title: Document Management System - Database Design
body: <p>I'm writing my own <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_management_system" rel="nofollow">Document Management System (DMS)</a> in Java (the ones available don't satisfy my needs).</p>
  
  <p>The documents shall be described by the Qualified DublinCore Metadata Standard. The easiest way to do this, in my opinion is do pack the key-value pairs in a RDF model with a XML representation.</p>
  
  <p>To store the metadata for all documents i have two ideas (the document files will be stored in the filesystem):</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Store all metadata of all documents in a <em>single</em> XML file</li>
  <li>Make a XML file for <em>each</em> document and store it either in the filesystem or in a RDBMS (like the H2 database engine for Java), a key-value database won't solve this because the keys for one document are not unique.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Since (many) documents are linked among each other the first approach may would be better for analysing the data, but the second approach may be much faster.</p>
  
  <p>Which solution you would recommend? Or are there any better solutions?</p>
  
  <p>Stefan</p>