I keep everything in a relational DB with a few core tables: Films, Editions, Formats, and Releases. Films stores the canonical title, director, and a unique film ID. Editions link to the film and capture release date, region, language, and any special features. Formats (Blu‑ray, DVD, 4K, etc.) point to the edition and store codec, HDR type, and whether it’s a disc or streaming variant. Releases add the distributor, catalog number, and the physical location in the vault. The bottleneck usually shows up in the Releases table when I try to keep track of every tiny press kit and distributor change. The data gets messy if I don’t normalize every new distributor code or if a release gets a sudden title change mid‑cycle. My schema works until the volume of edits in a single year explodes – that’s when I start writing scripts to auto‑merge or flag anomalies. If you’re running into similar pain, the key is a strict UUID for each entity and a small audit table that logs every change, so I can roll back a bad import without losing the whole line of work.

Good point about the single‑row audit; I’ve been doing that with a tiny `change_log` table but I’ve noticed it can get a little dusty when I batch‑import a whole distributor’s catalog. Adding a version column on Editions and Formats is a clever way to lock the state for each Release—no more “ghost” references. I’ll set up a partitioned audit on the quarterly basis you mentioned; if a distributor drops a surprise edition in March, I’ll be able to rewind the exact snapshot in seconds instead of hunting through a million rows. Appreciate the tip—next time I’ll ping you with a sample schema.