Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronic and Amp Hour fame? Boy I better not screw this up! :D Bad news: I use Altium Good news: I’m trying out kicad on my spar

Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronic and Amp Hour fame? Boy I better not screw this up! :D Bad news: I use Altium Good news: I’m trying out kicad on my spare time (feel free to take the credit) As to the question, Altium is quite flexible in regards to using a database as a library, but it is riddled with bugs, workarounds and generally weird stuff. I’ve tried from the extremely simple to the overly complex. In that order: - Easy level: Excel files on a shared NAS. Pros: * easy to set up. * easy to convince management to try it out. Cons: * Not really a database * You need to close Altium to add parts (this is very frustrating during sch capture) - Medium level: Acces database (mdb) on a shared NAS Pros: * easy to set up (not as quite as excel but similar) * you can add parts from inside Altium itself (with limited input interface) Cons: * because of how buggy Altium is the database tends to get completely corrupted. Almost daily backups are mandatory. * You need to set up a form for part management, directly editing the mdb files is a path to disaster even with as little as 2 people. Insane level: SQL server on AWS. Conected to local LAN through VPN. A simple php CRUD on apache for management. Pros: * Can handle heavish loads (a T2 micro can support about a dozen hardware engineers working in parallel) * should be more scalable * hides a lot of the complexity of the database for the junior engineers. * small sized NAS won’t suffer while someone is generating a BOM. * changes to database are more manageable if someone on the team knows sql. * more reliable and resilient to altium bugs Cons: * No internet connection means no one works. * possibly the most expensive solution PS: I’m on my phone, I’ll reformat stuff when I get my pc to make it more legible