Hello Dan,
There have been threads in this discussion saying that
storing MARC records on an RDBMS is almost impossible
since the "structure" for MARC are technically
unstructured and most implementations are flat and are
mostly declared as Character data.
On my experience, you can still accomplish storing
MARC records on RDBMS using several approaches. YOu
can store each MARC field to invidual fields in an
RDBMS. However, this would somehow be inefficient and
you will end up declaring a lot of fields and not use
them all.
YOu can also try creating a FIELDS table in your RDBMS
such as:
FIELDS table
field_id field
1000 Title
1001 Author
1002 URL
1003 whatever
Then linked the above table to your MARCTABLE
MARCTABLE
marcrec_id field_id value
100001 1000 The Road Ahead
100001 1001 Bill Gates
100001 1002 www.billgates.com
This would give you flexibility and this approach
could scale up or down whenever there are revisions
on the MARC standard without resturcturing your
database. However there are some downside to this
approach ... numeric and date fields will be stored as
character or text data. it needs some great deal of
expertise on RDBMSes to overcome this disadvantage.
Hope this helps.
Glenn Gamboa
system designer
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