Keeping old revisions of data?

What is the best way to keep old revisions of data in a relational database?

I am designing a new database to store a document collection at work. Currently, each document has an entry in a meta-data table which contains things like the title, keywords, the parent document, etc. The actual documents are stored in operating system level files.

Now, there are *many* problems with this system. A number of them are limitations of the database that I'm using, such as the 8K row size limit, hence the need to store documents outside the database if I want to be able to run a search on them.

I figure I can get around all of these without too much trouble.

My main problem is this: Since these are legal documents that define the policies and procedures that the office uses, and since these policies and procedures change over time, we need to store all of the old revisions of the documents. These also need to be able to be retrieved quickly.

Does anyone have experience with something like this? What would be the best way to approach this?

Thanks!
-- Dave Kimmel

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   ICQ: 5615049 Received on Fri Jul 14 2000 - 00:00:00 CEST