> As soon as you start embedding complex data into relational structours
> you start losing the ability to recover "information".
>
> In the SPECIFIC instance of OSCAR, the act of creating PDF's as data
> stores means there is no way to report back out of them so that data
> quality/ data integrity can be verified.
Tim (or anyone else familiar with OSCAR),
Can you elaborate on this? What sort of data is being stored solely in
PDFs, presumably as BLOBs in a table, or in the filesystem with pointers
to them in a table? I can conceive of several circumstances in which
storage of PDFs would be quite OK eg scanned copies of paper
correspondence, given that paper is still by far the most common
modality for health communication, and copies of outgoing reports and
correspondence. Even if such reports were generated entirely from data
in the database, there may be a business or legal requirement to keep a
snapshot of the data as it was when used to generate the report - and
just storing a PDF of the generated report might be a convenient way of
doing that.
I've heard good reports about how functional OSCAR is in real-life
practice from a person whose opinion I trust, although he did mention
that the user interface wasn't entirely to his taste, but admitted that
was a matter of personal preference. Thus your assertion that OSCAR may
contain an FDF (Fundamental Design Flaw) is the source of some surprise.
More details would be useful. I suspect that OSCAR may instead contain
an FDDO (Fundamental Design Difference of Opinion), also known as an
INDILT (I'd Never Design/Do It Like That). However, if it really is an
FDF as you assert, then you need to provide more details and evidence to
convince us and to help the OSCAR people and others to correct or avoid
such design mistakes - if they are in fact mistakes. Tell us more about
the circumstances in which OSCAR is using embedded PDFs as a primary
data store.
Tim C
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