After looking at many releases in Discogs and the edit history of various releases and how things have changed through time it is quite clear to see how the data model has changed.
Some of these changes have turned out well, while others were, in retrospect, probably not the right change to make. I am not blaming the developers as I know from experience how difficult it is to get a data model right the first time and how hard it is to change: as soon as something is in use it is non-trivial to change especially with a database the size of Discogs.
Still I want to go through a few examples where I think the current datamodel doesn't work. Most of my examples will focus on the fields from the "Barcodes and Other Identifiers" (BaOI) section. In this post I am looking at three of them: ISRC, SPARS codes and matrix/runout.
Storing the ISRC code per track would also allow other kinds of searches like "give me all physical releases with ISRC code XYZ" which could be quite a neat feature to have.
That's it for now. In the next few weeks I will look at more examples.
Some of these changes have turned out well, while others were, in retrospect, probably not the right change to make. I am not blaming the developers as I know from experience how difficult it is to get a data model right the first time and how hard it is to change: as soon as something is in use it is non-trivial to change especially with a database the size of Discogs.
Still I want to go through a few examples where I think the current datamodel doesn't work. Most of my examples will focus on the fields from the "Barcodes and Other Identifiers" (BaOI) section. In this post I am looking at three of them: ISRC, SPARS codes and matrix/runout.
ISRC
Currently ISRC codes (International Standard Recording Code, see previous articles about it for more information: 1, 2, 3) are stored in the BaOI section. It would be better to store these per track, as they are actually assigned per track. Right now there is a disconnect between the ISRC code and the actual track. Most people use the free text field for the ISRC field to indicate which track the ISRC code belongs to, but this is a bit of a hack (and I am very sure that there are releases where people made errors, but I haven't checked that yet).Storing the ISRC code per track would also allow other kinds of searches like "give me all physical releases with ISRC code XYZ" which could be quite a neat feature to have.
SPARS Codes
The SPARS codes (1, 2, 3, 4) are right now stored per release in BaOI, but the correct place would actually be per track. There are releases where they are different per track, although in most of the cases they are the same for all tracks on a disc. And, of course there can be multiple discs per release which do not necessarily need to have the same SPARS code.Matrix/Runout
The Matrix/Runout field should be stored per disc in a release. Releases that have multiple discs have different matrix/runouts. If there is just a single disc in a release this is actually the same as storing it at the level of the release, but on multi-disc releases this is not true. The current Discogs model doesn't really seem to store information at the disc level at all: it is either per release or per track and should likely be added to have some sort of intermediate level of granularity.That's it for now. In the next few weeks I will look at more examples.
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