A native text database: What for?

A significant gap lies between handling business (customer, product, finance, etc.) and text data (documents). Very often, word processing documents are stored somewhere within a confusing file structure with inscrutable hierarchy and low security. On the other hand, crucial data from an organization’s point of view are stored in databases. The infrastructure and the data are highly secure, multi-user capable and available for several other tools to build reports, content and knowledge. Our idea is to use a similar philosophy for texts. Therefore, we strive for the storage of texts in a database in a native way enables security and collaboration. By native, we mean that we can store text in a structured way in the database, so that database transactions can be applied. In this article, we describe our idea of turning text into valuable data. We present shortcomings of document processing, state of the art in document processing and a series of advantages for our database approach.