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jack wallstreet:

--- Quote from: JimH on June 11, 2009, 03:33:36 pm ---I don't think many people appreciate how solid and smart it is.

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I suspect a lot of people who use MC feel that MC has an exceptionally fast and stable database.  We probably just don't think about it until we are reminded.

Gl3nn:
The speed and performance of the existing database is, IMO, exceptional.  That being said, I'd love to see functionality like album and artist ratings made easily available, however it's done.

raldo:

--- Quote from: rick.ca on June 11, 2009, 06:40:27 pm ---their media record categories. The record, for example, could be for a name ("value") of an artist ("category") to which the user could add things like birth date, biography, etc. Media records would be associated by virtue of a particular "value" in a particular "category." This would be enough to "link" these "additional information" records so:

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Allow for a new media type, say, metadata. This mediatype does not require a 1-1 relationship with disk data.

You could then use smart expressions (as opposed to sql select) to tie, for example, videos together with people metadata.

JONCAT:
I have relations with my database ALL night long....we play tag together among other things  :o

It's quite functional, flexible, and if I'm not in the mood, I just restore to an earlier version!

dc

rick.ca:

--- Quote from: raldo on June 12, 2009, 01:00:21 pm ---Allow for a new media type, say, metadata. This mediatype does not require a 1-1 relationship with disk data. You could then use smart expressions (as opposed to sql select) to tie, for example, videos together with people metadata.
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Exactly. You seem to understand I'm not suggesting how this would be implemented "under the hood." I think it's safe to assume, especially considering the obvious brilliance of this development team, that it's at least "feasible." One reason for assuming so is it's not going to have any impact on performance—unless it is used. In this sense, I imagine it's impact might be similar to the current effect of using expressions in a view. If they are many and/or complex, they will slow things down. I don't think anyone objects to the existence of this feature because this is so.

If such a thing were to be implemented, there would obviously be many interface and behaviour design issues to be considered. I think the best approach would be to keep it simple, generic and intuitive. If users can understand exactly what it does, and have complete flexibility as to where it's used, they are more likely to appreciate it's utility and accept it's limitations. So, yes, I see this simply as the ability to create a separate table unrelated to media in which meta data about category items may be stored.

The idea is probably easier to convey by example. Imagine this feature exists, but I'm not yet using it. I now decide I want to record the bio of one of my favourite actors, Billy Bob Thornton. I create a view scheme—a new type that facilitates this feature. In the view configuration, I add a mandatory "key" or index field for which I must specify a "relation" which is a category in the media record—in this case, Actor. I suppose it would be appropriate for this special field to be named "Actor." I then add a Biography field. Having defined my new view, I would then simply enter "Billy Bob Thornton" as an actor and add his biography.

And now for the interface design issues... I imagine being able to do some or all of the following:


* Incorporate Biography into any other view using an expression, which might look like =Related(Actor, Biography).
* Use a split view whereby when I select the Actor "Billy Bob Thornton" in a media view, his related record would be displayed in the other view.
* Switch to the "additional data view" using the context menu for (i.e., right-clicking on) "Billy Bob Thornton"
* See a pop-up Biography on mouse-over of any occurrence of "Billy Bob Thornton" in the media record Actor category.
Now here's another design consideration, and my real reason for using Billy Bob as an example. He's also a musician. So do we need the ability to relate these additional information records to multiple categories (e.g., so Billy Bob is associated with his bio whether he appears as an actor or a musician)? Judging from this infamous interview, Billy Bob would take your head off if he knew we not respecting his split personality. But that's kind of rare—so it would be nice to be able to specify multiple categories, although I wonder if that makes things too complicated on the technical side. If not, I would then wonder if we might have the ultimate—the ability to specify a relation using an expression! 8)

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