Re: automatic field creation


If this is the case (i.e that you have a flat file), it is going to
become very limiting and very cumbersome. If you are part of an academic
institution, perhaps approach the mathematics department, they should be
able to point you to someone who knows and can help about relational
database structure.


First of all, thank you for the suggestion, actually I tried to look
for an engineer
or a data analyst in the BioInformatics departement here. Unfortuntely
I was no lucky
and I could not find anyone working on relational DBs (it looks like
all the people here love
SAS, and they do not see anything else than a spread*** to store
data...).

Because of that, and because I really like to do everything by myself
when I can
I started studying relational DBs and FM specifically.

Now, the question: what is a flat file ? I am sorry for the basic
question but I really do not know.

The DB structure I implemented is something very well defined in many
clinical DBs I saw and asked about:

a central table with a primary natural key (the ID) and a surrogate
one (the clinical chart number, so that
I can talk with the clinical DBs here) where demographic information
about the patient is stored, and many other tables for the
examinations : Echocardiography,
genetics, biomarkers, clinical variables etc...
all the tables are related trough the primary Patient key (ID), then
each table has its own primary key, as a serial number.

If you think there is something wrong in this, please let me know, I
am ready to send you also the DB, or if you have
something you trust (preferably in FM) you could send me an empty DB
just to understand how to make it in the right way.

regards


Cheers !


Chris Brown- Hide quoted text -

Diego


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