Horst Herb wrote: > On Thu, 29 Dec 2005 11:53, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >>Having sunk countless hours into this and have very little to show for it, >>personally I'm convinced there must be a better way. > > > The way I took / am taking with mini-gnumed is as follows: > > the problems / situation: > 1.) fully normalized tables proved to be too unwieldly / slow for some > purposes - e.g. selecting patients from a list box after entering a name, and > you want some demograpohic details (name, age, dob, street, town ...) display > in the selector box > > 2.) denormalized tables can be a pain in the butt when updating data & trying > to keep data consistent, but are very easy for reading information quick > > 3.) simulating denormalized tables with updateable views is a bit slow for > reading purposes, and most access will be read-only Does the data in the denormalised tables always need to be up-to-date? For offering auto-completions for stuff like drugs, disease codes etc., where speed is paramount, could you not re-create the read-only denormalised tables overnight?
For the actual patient data, such as a list of drugs, you would be left with a 1-way join between the single denormalised "drugs" table and a "link_patient_to_drug" table, surely that should be fast enough? Ian _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
