[Emsan-l] EMSAN database structure proposal

[Kevin Austin]

Thank you.

My experience in doing this is that there are a number of things to seriously consider. In building a database for ea compositions in 1984, we grappled with the issue of whether the files would be able to be read in 50 years. They could not be read 15 years later when they had been formatted in a non-standard fashion. The files that were entered as basic text(s) were easily converted to newer formats.

Two of the most annoying issues were: date, duration. These are of particular importance as these will be among the primary fields for searching and sorting.


You may want to set the date field to:
   yyyy / mm / dd
This is more easily sorted when done in a text field (such as a table in Word).


For the duration of the work, you may wish to consider the format of

  00 : 00 : 00    (h : m : s)

or

  00:00:00.000   (h:m:s.000)

This is a common format in some software, and avoids the use of the non-standard quotation marks 
X: 5'19"; Y: 4'38"; Z: 3'53"
which have two Unicode codes (U+0027 (39) and U+0022 (34)), and (U+2018 (8216), U+2019 (8217) and U+201C (8220), U+201D (8221)).

This is a kind of complexity that in my experience, you may wish to avoid.


Best wishes for the western New year.



Kevin





On 2010, Jan 6, at 8:16 AM, Battier Marc wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> Following the Octobre 28 Beijing meeting where this has been discussed, here is a draft for the EMSAN database structure. This draft is already put to use by Prof. Huang in Taiwan, but please send you remarks and comments to the list.
> 
> Best wishes,
> 
> Marc Battier
> 
> <LOG_EMSAN DB FIELDS3.pdf>_______________________________________________
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