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

[Karsten Hilbert]

> > 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.
Feel free to re-implement, I suppose.

If we want portability we'd need to refrain from stored
procedures and triggers, too. Views are barely portable, too.

Karsten
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