Almost 20 year Altium vet here, getting started with Kicad 9.
Is there a way to set up the libraries in a manner that emulates Altium’s DbLib?
An access DB linked the schematic symbol, footprint, 3d bodies, internal part number, and other important fields. I strongly prefer this to most anything else I’ve seen except the now extinct SVNDbLib of Altium.
For simple parts like SMD R’s and C’s, creating a new part is absolutely trivial, I just copy and paste a line that already has most of the data like symbol and footprint, change the MPN and internal PN fields, and the resistance etc, and I’m done. I initially found the altium way difficult but years of experience have convinced me it is a far better way than manually linking symbols to footprints etc.
This does require a line in the DB for every component, but I’ve found it to be trivial to manage, easy to add parts into, and easy to interface with other related software like Aligni.
Ok, that’s looking good. I used MS Access with Altium, but it’s been a few years since I set that up, and I was working with one of their best support engineers. At the end his comment was “I have a stack of bug reports to file!”
So, how best to start in Kicad?
I suppose the first step would be knowing how Kicad wants to see the schematic symbol and footprint fields called out.
In addition to the documentation there are various forum posts here about other people setting up database libraries, for example A database case study - #10 by teletypeguy
The documentation explains how the database columns get mapped to KiCad properties – I would recommend reading through the documentation first, and then mentioning if anything about the current documentation is unclear so that we can look at improving it.