Several years ago I took the decision to move towards maintaining one master genealogy database. That decision was brought about mainly by the difficulties of duplication in Places and Sourcing through minor recording differences but there are also the difficulties of differing sentencing, custom reports, repositories et al.
My reason for starting this specific discussion is to try and understand how other users have progressed over the last several years:
Are you moving more towards one master database?
Are you moving more towards smaller specific data sets?
How do you manage the Places, Sources, Sentencing etc difference between different RM files?
What could Rootsmagic do in your opinion to overcome the challenges of working in a very large database?
In my opinion one Master Database is the logical direction to take maintaining all the Core aspects of your work in one single place. I also understand Rootsmagic does not facilitate this very well at present and past development to export and import core database components and the Compare Files feature may suggest a path of helping multiple database users rather than tackling the issues of bringing those data sets together?
The Virtual database concept has been introduced in various other threads by various users but not on a specific thread to my knowledge. I believe we all know the problem when we first started our research of the my line & my wifes line probably followed by the Smiths of Ohio etc, I know I do. So what can RM and other programs do to facilitate users towards one Dataset?, should they even care or continue to help users maintain smaller differing datasets?
Named Groups have helped with larger datasets but it would seem to me that another database change to include Tags would seem to have some virtue.