[theList] Music Database

Stephen Rider evolt_org at striderweb.com
Mon Jun 16 14:09:58 CDT 2003


On Monday, June 16, 2003, at 01:30  PM, Arthur Kaye wrote:

> Does it matter what instruments a musician plays on a particular track?

I think that extent of specificity is a matter of preference.  I 
probably wouldn't go that far.

However, thinking about the question made me notice a small problem 
with the reworked chart.  Because multiple Musicians (generally) work 
on each recording, the Musician/Recording connection has to be 
many-to-many also, which puts a join table between them.  That was one 
of the advantages of the Band/Recording connection -- "band" acted as a 
consolidation of Musicians so the Recording connection was simpler.

I'm also still a bit uncomfortable with the logical distance between 
Bands and Albums.  It seems that one of the most obvious searches 
someone might do is to want a list of all albums by a particular Band, 
and it seems that exchanging Musician and Band has complicated this 
quite a bit.

I see this as the Key question at this point:
Within the logic of the database, who makes an album, one Band or many 
Musicians?

I'm still up in the air on this one, but I'm starting to think that The 
Band should have a many-to-many link to the Recording.  That way 
multiple Bands can work on the same Recording, such as "Queen" and 
"David Bowie - solo" recording "Under Pressure".  Whole albums have 
been done this way, as well, such as Band "Concrete Blonde" and Band 
"Los Illegales" doing an album together.  This also allows for whole 
albums of Duets, such as Frank Sinatra's "Duets" Albums.

(Note: In actually putting together a database of this sort, I would 
probably _not_ put the " - solo" after a solo Musician Band.  I just 
use that in discussion to distinguish between the Musician and the 
"Band" of the same name.)



FOR THE RECORD:   Though I think I'm pretty strong on the theory, I 
have never actually put together a database this complex before.  
Someone with more direct experience with Big Uglies like this sucker 
might have different insight into non-obvious problems that can arise 
from this type of structure....



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