Thanks so much for all the advice and information! I think I can get started now! :)
On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 6:36 PM, Simon Slavin <slav...@bigfraud.org> wrote: > > On 9 Mar 2012, at 4:00pm, John Salerno <johnj...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 7:29 AM, Simon Slavin <slav...@bigfraud.org> wrote: >> >>> Sooner or later you're going to want to make a list which is sorted in >>> artist order. And you're going to want to list 'The Beatles' (if you have >>> any taste at all). But if you list artists in name order they'd come in >>> the Ts, not the Bs because 'The' is part of the band name. So having a >>> "sortOrder" field lets you enter 'The Beatles' as the band name but >>> 'Beatles, The' in the sortOrder field. Similarly, 'Elvis Presley' should >>> be sorted under 'P', not 'E'. Of course you could enter 'Presley, Elvis' >>> instead of the name in the order humans would say it, but I consider that a >>> way of saying "The computer is more important that you so humans must adapt >>> to the computer way.", which is an attitude I despise. >> >> Do I have to manually edit the name of the band to insert the >> information in the sortOrder field? Wouldn't that require me to know >> something about the exact wording of the band/artist name? Or is there >> some generic way to do this? Simply switching the first and last name >> wouldn't work, since that would mess up band names that aren't people >> names, etc. > > You can work some way towards it in software, by doing things like changing > "The <anything>" to "<anything>, The" and assuming any name with two words in > is a person's name (though there are exceptions like 'Pink Floyd'. But no, > to get them all right you'd have to have a human look at them. But you don't > have to get them all right on first entry: > > One great advantage of having three independent tables is that you can set up > your initial data import to do the conversion from "name" to the "sortOrder" > poorly, or even not at all (just copy "name" into the "sortOrder") and then > if someone changes the sortOrder field of an artist later, all your existing > data about the songs and plays will magically start showing up in the new > sort order without someone having to go through all the data which has > already been entered. This is a great advantage of the 'normalization' we > keep going on about: just change one piece of data once, and many other > things immediately reflect the change. > > Simon. > _______________________________________________ > sqlite-users mailing list > sqlite-users@sqlite.org > http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@sqlite.org http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
