Hello,
I wonder if you could advise on this point.
The question is about the best way to design a
"many-to-many" relationship in terms of speed of
execution and efficiency
To explain it - There are these two lists :
Medicines = 70
Patients = 2000
Now, I want to design the database so that a user
could SELECT a "Patient's Name" to find out which
MEDICINES he/she has been
prescribed.
There are already 70 tables, (one for each medicine).
Each table has a column listing all the patients on
that medicine. For example:
ASPIRIN lists 1989 patients's names (in one column)
VALIUM lists 734 patients' names
so on
There is also one table called PATIENTS. It lists all
the 2000 individuals' names
Is there a better way other than the obvious one - to
me as a novice - i.e to have 71 columns like so
PATIENT_NAME | Aspirin | Valium |
Panadol | Penicillin | Vitamin_C | ...
to MEDICINE70
The PATIENT_NAME column will have ALL 2000 patients.
The rows may have some of the 70 MEDICINEs
(obviously depending on whether he/she is on that
drug)
Then one could use "mysql_fetch_array" to get the
result as an array.
Perhaps there is a faster and more efficient way!
Regards
David
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