A database for digital assets I work at a print shop that has a decent sized archive of old print jobs. Currently, to find a job we have to search the SMB share (on win2000 server), which looks through a few hundred thousand files.

Our job data is organized by: Year>Month>Customer_Name_Job#  and then the contents of the job are inside the last folder.

Is there a way to create a database so that we can query a job desc. or job number? Basically just a simple search that is faster than searching with windows search would be great. I tried the windows index service but it only finds .doc file, not folder names or PDFs.

In the future we are planning on making a SQL database where complete info will be entered when the job is created so it is easily queried in the future. I was hoping to throw together something that will make it easier to search older orders.
You could use a Document-oriented database for this. You could then create a program in your preferred language to import the existing documents into the db, parsing the folder structure for the metadata (customer, job#, etc).