Question

I have a couple hundred text files that have data that looks like:

Capo: 77/100
Define: 0/70
Largo: 85/85
Facto: 16/75

Would a database be appropriate for this? If it is, I can’t think of a way to properly structure a table.

One might think to make columns for Capo, Define, Largo, and Facto but across these several hundred text files there are about a 200 different words, that would each require a column if that were to be done.

Answer 1

You could store them in a kind of key/value structure, like this;

Values:
Key    v1  v2
-------------
Capo    0 166
Largo  77  77
Facto  10  20

If they relate to each other, you can give those values a parent id to group them:

Values:
Parent Key    v1  v2
---------------------
0      Capo    0 166
0      Largo  77  77
0      Facto  10  20
1      Capo    5  88

If the words are fixed, you could normalize them to a different table:

Words:
WordID  Word
------------
1       Capo
2       Largo
3       Facto
4       Define

Values:
Parent WordId v1  v2
---------------------
0      1       0 166
0      2      77  77
0      3      10  20
1      1       5  88

As an alternative, you may want to look like a storage like MongoDB. It allows you to store ‘documents’ which each have different properties.