Re: Help finding natural keys

>> I have SFS. I'll get D&D then. If it is more about modeling, it
will be a
help. It sounds like there's more to it than sequences versus SELECT MAX(). <<

Quite a bit more <g>

>> (I'll be sure to follow the formatting standards that people on
this group expect in the future. Thank you for fixing my formatting.) <<

That is just me, and not some set of rules the newsgroup has ...

>> I will never permit myself to suffer the indignity of being
fingerprinted by my grocer. <<

It is just for checking cashing; you will not starve you to death, but you might have to pay cash. I wonder about a biometric smart card where I put the card into their machine, my finger (eyeball, whatever) somewhere and the card acts as an intermediary that says "Yep, trust me, this really is Joe Celko, account #9999".

>> Are there any countries out that don't collect taxes? <<

Some Arab states where everyone is family and is stinking rich? Then their names might make good identifiers ...

>> SSN, of course, is a candidate key, but I don't see people using it
as a
primary key often, so I assume their are issues. One that occurs to me is if
a patient is admitted in an emergency and their SSN cannot be determined at the time of admission. (We do not deal with emergency just yet.) <<

SSN gets used for driver's licence numbers, college id numbers, etc. in many states. One problem with it is that there are a lot of duplicates, thanks to errors and illegal immigrants.

>> Also, with SSN, there would be a problem since firms are not
supposed to
know about each others patients. <<

Ouch! That makes it hard to track a person's medical history ...

>> Indeed, the reality is somewhat unorganized, but they get by. Most
of our
customers are looking for us to replace paper patient charts. <<

A hospital in Atlanta had a rather ambitous project along those lines and their system fell apart. I am not qualified to talk about medical records reporting, but there are people in that field.

>> In the real world, patients are identified by name by someone who
is responsible for a dozen or so patients. <<

Maybe the name and the name of the responsible person form a key?

>> These health care organizations use questionnaires designed by the
nurses, usually in Word ... questionnaire is a model of a blank questionnaire, it is meta data, a completed questionnaire is an instance of the questionnaire ... a questionnaire can have sub-questionnaires ... <<

Arrrgh!!

>> Eagerly awaiting the new tree book. <<

Me, too. I hope to se proofs in a few more weeks.

This is looking like more of a problem than we can do in a newsgroup thread ... Received on Fri Jan 17 2003 - 17:20:32 CST