Re:A Simple Guide to Five Normal Forms in Relational Databas...
by Confusion on Monday August 02, 2010 @02:26AM
(#1567023)
No, that would not be a good thing to support. There can be Doctors and Patients that refer to the same real person, but you don't normalize these entities with respect to a single Person column. It's just not worth it, because you too rarely care that a Doctor can also be a Patient. In such a case, if it poses a problem (only when Patient is assigned himself as Doctor?), it will sort itself out in The Real World.
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Re:A Simple Guide to Five Normal Forms in Relational Databas...
by nradov on Monday August 02, 2010 @02:41AM
(#1567044)
The HL7 RIM actually allows for this. A Person can have multiple roles including Patient and LicensedEntity (doctor).
http://www.hl7.org/v3ballot/html/infrastructure/rim/rim.htm
Re:A Simple Guide to Five Normal Forms in Relational Databas...
by Confusion on Monday August 02, 2010 @02:59AM
(#1567067)
True, this example of doctors and patients is just the wrong sort of example, because that world has already been standardized into oblivion. However, in general, for your relatively small app for company X, you wouldn't go this far. In general, the fact that a supplier can sometimes also be a client is usually not very interesting.