Re: My honours project - databases using dynamically attached entity-properties

On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 16:50, David Fetter wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 14, 2007 at 02:28:03PM +0000, Gregory Stark wrote:
> > "David Fetter" <david(at)fetter(dot)org> writes:
> >
> > > CREATE TABLE symptom (
> > > symptom_id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY, /* See above. */
> > > ...
> > > );
> > >
> > > CREATE TABLE patient_presents_with (
> > > patient_id INTEGER NOT NULL REFERENCES patient(patient_id),
> > > symptom_id INTEGER NOT NULL REFERENCES symptom(symptom_id),
> > > UNIQUE(patient_id, symptom_id)
> > > );
> >
> > I'm just glad I don't have your doctor. I hope mine doesn't think
> > symptoms are all boolean values.
>
> What's in the symptom table is up to the doctor.

OK, and here's the problem: each doctor might want to put something else
in the symptom table. Each doctor might want to do it in a type safe
way, e.g. so that the application enforces an enumeration of
"high/moderate/low" for the symptom fever (or maybe another doctor wants
it in exact degrees)... you can all stuff it in a string field, but you
know how reliable that will be.

Cheers,
Csaba.