[LUNI] file system limitations

[Erik Lickerman]

The plan is to use the system I described for the day to day transactions of
charting, i.e. writing notes and reading notes on individual patients.

If you want to do queries across a patient population, for research or
business purposes, my plan is to output the individual charts in an XML
format and then import that into a well designed relational database.  This
would be the warehouse you mention, so in a sense, I am planning to do both.

Erik

-----Original Message-----
From: luni-admin at luni.org [mailto:luni-admin at luni.org]On Behalf Of
Steven Lembark
Sent: Monday, November 18, 2002 11:12 AM
To: luni at luni.org
Subject: RE: [LUNI] file system limitations




-- Erik Lickerman <elickerman at ameritech.net>

> What is in my mind here?  It is a medical application.  Because there is
> never a need to do a join across different patients, rather than put all
> patients in a single relational database, I have divided it up so each
> patient's chart is a directory containing a handful of data files.  To
> access a particular patient, you look him up in an LDAP directory.  This
> gives you the chart id and the address of the server the chart is on.  You
> then contact the server (an EJB running on JBoss) and pass it the chart id
> which is the name of the directory the patient's chart is in.
>
> The advantage of this setup, versus the one large database approach, is
> scalability, both with more powerful hardware and with additonal machines.
> It also makes it simple to transfer a chart to another physical location.
> Just move the directory, and change the server address in the directory.
>
> If a practice has 20,000 patients, that means 20,000 directories on the
> server, but in any given half hour period, probably only fifty directories
> would be accessed.  Gievn what you and the others have told me, it sounds
> as if this is no problem.

Will this be used as an operational data store or a truly
persistent database of patient history? A well designed
warehouse will store terabytes of patient information in
a relational system where the queries are simpler to design.



--
Steven Lembark                               2930 W. Palmer
Workhorse Computing                       Chicago, IL 60647
                                            +1 800 762 1582
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