-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hello Shawn Green,
Je Merkredo Januaro 26 2005 15:42, [EMAIL PROTECTED] skribis: > If it were me, I would have separate tables for groups, songs, > performances, recordings, and artists. Well, the thing is that I was just doing a site for holding information for musicians (that is, lyrics with chords to play in the guitar or piano), but the thing started to grow as I am a very structured person I wanted to have a very nice structure. What you say makes sense, but the thing starts to be even bigger, I'm not sure that anyone would be able to introduce data if it's so complicated. Anyway, I'm already tempted to introduce your ideas and I think I can't be untempted. The thing is that this is art, and art is hard to structure. What is a song ? ok, Freddie Mercury composed a song, he wrote the music, he wrote the lyrics and he recorded with a band called Queen. Latter, someone else comes and record it, but changes the lyrics, is it still the same song ? What if the music is changed and the lyrics stay ? what if everything changes, but the title/name remains ? As I can't ensure when it is still the same song, I would take the asumption that all of them are different songs. But then, my asumption might be wrong. For example, the last song of the album Queen (the first album by the band Queen) has the same name as the last song of the album Queen II, the music is similar, slightly changed, and the second version has lyrics while the first one doesn't. Is it the same song or two separate songs ? the same songs and two different performances ? > I would define Group as "one or more people that perform a version of a > song". Each member of a Group will be an Artist (person). Ok. > A Performance is a unique combination of GROUP - SONG - RECORDING. Some A performance can be a unique combination of artist (person) - song - recording as well! > Groups remake or remix or rerecord the same song several times over their > career so each perfomance should be treated uniquely. Indeed. > This will help to > differentiate studio recordings from live recordings of the same song. Agreed. > Groups can form and reform over the course of several years but keep the > same name so (especially if you are creating a database to deal with > performance royalties) you should also keep up with group lineups by date > ranges. You can do this either by creating a new Group record for each > line up (each with the same name but for different date ranges) or you > handle this on your Groupmembership table. Disjoint membership spans would > get two or more records. For example "Joe" is part of "<insert band name > here>" from 1988 to 1990 then leaves (for whatever reason) and eventually > rejoins the band from 1995 until their breakup in 1996. That would be one > Group record with two Groupmembership records that associates Joe to his > band for two different date ranges. This was in my mind... I was trying to convince myself that the system was good enough without this information, but again, I'm tempted to implement your solution. > Artists are in general just people. Performers, producers, lyricists, > arrangers, backup musicians, engineers, etc. This is your master table of > Who's-who. > > There should be a table or tables that associates the construction of each > Song to one or more Artists. You could create separate tables for > lyricists, composers, and arrangers (the normalized approach) or one table > and include a value for how that artist contributed to the song (sometimes > faster to work with but takes up more room). Takes more room because of the extra field ? Can you tell me more about 'the normalized approach' ? > I think you were on the right track but were just trying to merge too many > objects into the same containers. Then I have albums, which are collections of songs, with a track number and have one or more musicians (which can be persons or groups) asociated. For the album "It's a kind of magic", the main artists would be Queen, while a lot of other people participated in the album, even as musicians (that is, playing an instrument or doing something). I'm still stuck with the problem that groups and artists are interchangable things, how would you solve this ? Thank you for your comments, they were greatly appretiated. - -- Pupeno: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www.pupeno.com Reading Science Fiction ? http://sfreaders.com.ar -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFB96F3fW48a9PWGkURAnZKAJ9y9+H/vhB+0lLPEQxw2LMDyWfNiwCfVaRz SzvKTgyHZ3YBovGfT3+GuPk= =Moax -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
