Re: [Gnumed-devel] use of PG inheritance in GNUmed

[Roberto Mello]

On Sat, Mar 13, 2004 at 12:15:09PM +1100, Tim Churches wrote:
> A quick question: in general terms, how is PostgreSQL inheritance used
> in GNUmed? I've been looking carefully at this feature of PG, and am a
> bit confused by it, because column (definitions) are inherited by the
> child tables from the parent tables, but rows are inherited by the
> parents from the child table. In other words, the inheritance of columns
> and rows operate in opposite directions, which doesn't seem very useful
> to me - or at least it isn't for my purposes (unrelated to GNUmed). Does
> this characteristic of the inheritance cause problems for GNUmed, or is
> it an advantage.

Inheritance should not be used. Sticking to the relation model as much as
possible will save us from problems and portability issues.

-Roberto

-- 
+----|        Roberto Mello   -    http://www.brasileiro.net/  |------+
+       Computer Science Graduate Student, Utah State University      +
+       USU Free Software & GNU/Linux Club - http://fslc.usu.edu/     +
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