Hi,

I'm sorry for jumping in late. From a programmer's point of view I
don't see any problem to squeeze bibliographic data into a relational
database as long as the data are not "recursive", i.e. as long as you
have fixed levels of bibliographic information and not an arbitrary
number of levels (a published in b part of c appeared in d
...). Author names, keywords, periodical names, user-specific notes
etc are good candidates for the relational model. Indexing is then
done by the RDBMS. For this approach it is important to break down the
bibliographic information instead of adding it as a blob.

regards,
Markus

Karen Coyle writes:
 > For reasons that are hard to explain in an email, bibliographic data and
 > relational db models are not compatible. Although bibliographic databases
 > often use normal relational DBMSs (Sybase, Oracle), they do not use them in
 > a truly relational way. In general, software must be written to create
 > heading and keyword indexes, and the bibliographic data is stored as a
 > "blob". Putting bibliographic data into a DBMS is somewhat like putting
 > full text data into a DBMS -- you end up using specialized indexing
 > software (like Inktomi or Google) rather than the DBMS capabilities.
 >

--
Markus Hoenicka
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