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Re: [Gnumed-devel] Might ref.consumable substances need to allow an amou
From: |
Jim Busser |
Subject: |
Re: [Gnumed-devel] Might ref.consumable substances need to allow an amount of zero? |
Date: |
Mon, 05 Sep 2011 02:22:56 -0700 |
On 2011-09-05, at 12:34 AM, Karsten Hilbert wrote:
> Or rather:
>
> alter table ref.consumable_substance
> add constraint ref_consumable_uniq_subst_amount_unit
> unique(upper(description), amount, unit);
>
> since units can be intended to mean something different
> depending on case.
Yes, the above is more technically correct, except duplicates will end up
resulting on account of (for example) the Canadian data is supplied entirely in
upper case. Thousands of drugs denoted with strengths of
MG
which literally should be Mega-Gigas !*^!!!
The argument against what I proposed rests on it doing some injustice to a
substance which wants to be created but cannot because it is not allowed to
share the same units (just in a different case) as an existing substance, and
bear in mind this only applies when the description and the amounts are also
shared. In order for this to be a real scenario, it seems it would depend on a
substance being supplied at one billion times a lower strength e.g
MU
vs mU
whereas the risk of duplicates (which will be unable to be pruned, on account
of them getting variously keyed into patient records) is a real one.
Can we accept to make the constraint
unique(upper(description), amount, upper(unit))
and we could always liberalize it later upon getting a real complaint (?)
-- Jim