Dear all, I think before we discuss how we are going to build a persistence layer we need to discuss how we are going to use it. Is it to support a simple electronic healthcare record application which only collects basic information, print the information on a computer screen or on a paper on a small center for primary health care? Or is it to support an information system for electronic healthcare record information used everywhere on a large hospital (or a country!) and where the system is able to amongst others support data intensive applications like real time data driven decision support systems? If it is the first case the persistence layer can be built in many different ways and where some of the ways are simple and fast to build. If it is the second case there are much fewer ways to build the persistence layer and probably none of them are simple and fast to build.
Regards, Mikael Mikael Nystr?m M Sc in Computer Science and Engineering Ph D student in Medical Informatics Department of Biomedical Engineering Link?ping University