Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: Currently Using Spreadsheet for Personal Project - Thinking About Database

Hey Paul,



> In this case, one book would be duplicated, and duplication is
> usually a bad idea.
>
> It would be better to put all the books into a single Books table.

I'm here to learn so I'll take your advice and do a single table.


> > Then if I set up some kind of a report that told me the next book in
> > the series, when I query "Harry Potter" it would give me "Harry
> > Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" (and possibly list all other books
> > in the series that are not yet read, or list all books in the series,
> > highlight the ones that are unread, or some such thing)
>
> This can still be done if they are all in a Books table.

+1


> > What I don't want is my main table to include both read and "want to
> > read" books - I like keeping the "what I've read" completely separate
> > as this is what I'm most interested in for tracking purposes (to meet
> > my goal) and what not.
>
> Well, this is a big deal in a spreadsheet, where all that data is just
> smooshed together and you have trouble visually separating it, but in a
> database this isn't actually a problem. By design, tables are meant to
> hold lots of data like this, and you query just the data you want at
> any given time. It is better to design it as one big table, and pull
> out only the data you want to see, than to separate it into multiple
> tables that hold duplicate data. With duplicate data you are not only
> wasting storage space (perhaps very little in this case, but in
> principle a bad thing), but also bringing in the possibility of that
> data differing in the different locations in which it is stored,
> and then which copy do you trust?

Sounds reasonable.

So questions (again thank you much for your guidance, I'm definitely
starting the process tonight):

when I make the form to enter new data (ie. a new read book) can it be
designed to where it searches the current books in Books table and then if,
and only if, it doesn't find a match (based on author + book title), it
starts a new form for me to enter new data?

For a series, is there a way for me to do like "enter a series" and then it
would prompt  ("how many books in this series") and when I put in 5, it
would then auto fill author + series name, so all I have to do is enter
book titles for the 5 books and all 5 would be added to the Books table?

Reading books twice - I don't do this often, but when I do, I expect the
pages to count twice. Best way to accomplish this is to have another field
called "Count" and then page count would be Page Count * Count (# of times
read)?

I'm getting excited about this as I've come up with another cool idea that
might be easy. I'm going to link books to the library, so for "next book in
series" would be a link that I could click and easily put on hold at the
library :) I think that this would be both awesome and relatively easy
(assuming the library has a standard method of searching which I suspect it
does).

Best,
Joel
-- 
*Joel Madero*
LibreOffice QA Volunteer
jmadero.dev@gmail.com

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