Alsvha wrote:
...it is funny you should mention thinking from the perspective of a printing catalogue, as that is excatly what the scope of the project is, creating a new catalogue... I am attempting to draw inspiration as to the various other methods of designing the database; such as pro and cons with dynamic table creation, many nullables in each row of a table and so on... I'm attempting to keep it on a somewhat abstract level to better get the whole picture.
Our company, years ago, developed a program specifically designed to handle large amounts of printed information of all kinds in the simplest possible way - we call it a wysiwyg "pagebase" and since the pages themselves are the database, it is fast, efficient, easy to understand and use, etc - there is no "translation" from database format to viewing format and back, and the user's idea of the thing is identical to the developer's. We've been using it for all of our corporate data for almost ten years now. I can send you a PDF of the documentation (about 100 pages) if you're interested in this kind of "inspiration", but you'll have to email me directly so I have a place to send it (you can use the email button below).