Ok, perhaps my original statement of making changes all over the place is
too strong. Let's say that there are too many places to make changes to make
testing the changes relatively painless. Its too much work to change the
structure at the moment. I would like to create a system that is more
tolerant to accepting more data.
> I don't know what I'd use one for -- what exactly is the trouble with
> tables and rows, aside from the fact that they aren't XML (and neither
> should they be). You can get OO DBs but they're not really what you
> are looking for.
When the DTD changes someone has to sit down and write perl code and then
test that perl code. I would like to see a system where I could define a DTD
and a set of SQL statements that map DTD fields to columns/rows/tables. I
have no problem writing a DTD and SQL statements, I just don't want to have
to change the perl glue logic to make everything work. Its more a matter of
consistency, testablity and maintainablity than it is lazyness.
> Fred by Tori Amos 3:40 on the Album "Fred and other songs"
> Fred by U2 3:55 on the Album "U2 sings Tori Amos"
> Fred (Live) by U2 4:05 on the Album "U2 in Los Alamos"
> Fred by Tori Amos 5:45 on the Single "Fred Mixes"
> Fred by Tori Amos 3:40 on the Album "Best of Tori"
>
> Which of those tracks are "copies of one track"?
>
> Answer: Just two, the ones which are the same length, title and artist
> (this would hopefully be identical tracks)
>
> Answer: Three - any time an artist sings the same song that's the same
> track, even if they use different instruments and sing different words
>
> Answer: All of them -- Who cares who's version of "Imagine" it is,
> they're all pretty much the same to me.
Here we need to improve our nomenclature and define what 'same' means. The
following it far from perfect, but it should illustrate my point:
Audio recording -- a recoding of music, either live or in the studio
Same recoding -- both tracks come from the same audio recording
Same song -- same lyrics and performer, but from a different audio
recording. A live version and a studio version performed by the same artists
would be considered a same song.
Cover song -- same lyrics, but different performer and obviously different
audio recording
As Nick is pointing out, there are different relationships that first need
to be defined.
--ruaok Freezerburn! All else is only icing. -- Soul Coughing
Robert Kaye -- robert nospam at moon.eorbit.net http://moon.eorbit.net/~robert