From: Fred Lindberg Date: March 21 1999 5:35pm Subject: Re: design question List-Archive: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql/717 Message-Id: <19990321173749.779.qmail@id.wustl.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit On Sun, 21 Mar 1999 12:27:05 -0500, Ayman Haidar wrote: >I would like to design a table for medicines, as you know they come in >different dosages and different frequency. I was woindering what is the >best way to create the table, I was thinking like this; It depends if you later want to store other info and if you want to be able to search dosages: For a "active substance" there are several brands (cimetidine is the US as "cimetidine", "tagamet", etc). In that case, you may want to have a table for "active substances" and one for trade names pointing to it. Price differs between brands and sometimes dosage may differ as well (e.g. brand 1 can be given 800 mg x 1 or 400 mg x 2, but brand2 hasn't been tested at 800 mg x 1 and is recommented only at 400 mg x 2). If dosage is for a patient, it's better to store it with the patient info. If it is generic dosage recommendations, they differ with indication (e.g. 400 mg twice a day for ulcer, 800 mg at night for heart burn, and 10 mg/kg divided into 2 doses per day for children). It may also be a range. For some medicines, duration is important and there are complicated examples (100 mg daily for 1 week, then skip 3 weeks; repeat cycle 3 times). It's worth thinking a lot when designing and knowing exactly what you want to use the database for. -Sincerely, Fred (Frederik Lindberg, Infectious Diseases, WashU, St. Louis, MO, USA)