Thank you, killermookie, for bringing a little sanity to the conversation! It's funny how quickly people forget that delivery companies (UPS especially) pay very well because they realize that most people don't consider that work fun. A lot of college kids use it to help pay for school, just like you. After all, it IS manual labor. The bottom line is -- UPS is a good company to work for.
Here's a short example. Just opened the USMARC Bibliographic Format notebook, volume 2, and flipped to a random page (page 511). Field 511. Subfield codes include "a" ("Participant or performer note"; as the second character). But this could be untyped (when the cataloger doesn't know the exact role the person played), "Hosted by", "Anchor", "Voices" (repeating field), "Presenter", or "Narrator" (to just list the examples from the notebook). Trying to integrate this flexibility into a RDBMS (or even an ODBMS) would be incredibly tricky, esp. considering that the text is largely free-text.
And this is just one subfield. There are many subfields per field and hundreds of fields. The complexity is too great for most generic/off-the-shelf systems (Access, MySQL, etc) to handle.
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Thank you, killermookie, for bringing a little sanity to the conversation! It's funny how quickly people forget that delivery companies (UPS especially) pay very well because they realize that most people don't consider that work fun. A lot of college kids use it to help pay for school, just like you. After all, it IS manual labor. The bottom line is -- UPS is a good company to work for.
Here's a short example. Just opened the USMARC Bibliographic Format notebook, volume 2, and flipped to a random page (page 511). Field 511. Subfield codes include "a" ("Participant or performer note"; as the second character). But this could be untyped (when the cataloger doesn't know the exact role the person played), "Hosted by", "Anchor", "Voices" (repeating field), "Presenter", or "Narrator" (to just list the examples from the notebook). Trying to integrate this flexibility into a RDBMS (or even an ODBMS) would be incredibly tricky, esp. considering that the text is largely free-text.
And this is just one subfield. There are many subfields per field and hundreds of fields. The complexity is too great for most generic/off-the-shelf systems (Access, MySQL, etc) to handle.
Hope this helps,
John