"E-gad is right.  You know, the scary thing is that we're talking about software that could concievably end up KILLING PEOPLE, and it's more important that development happens quickly instead...

"Compare that with the XML solution: once you agree on a particular schema (including a DTD), all the grunt work is already coded in most XML frameworks, you only worry about...

"How do you create or consume XML from within your programs?"

First of all, let's ban the word "consume" from any discussion of data

"I'm not sure how long you retain this information (I suspect for some time), but what you are describing certainly sounds like a warehouse scenario."

You need to retain clinical data...

Thanks for all your kind words. A few thoughts.

As it says in the heading in italics, I originally wrote this 7 years ago. I...

Oh, I absolutely agree, the data model comes first. It is the heart of any system. The "application model" comes on top of that. No arguments there.

The reason why I...

No, users are king. Liberace said it best, "Without the business, there's no show". How you optimize should depend on the business needs first.

OK, lemme ask you. There are 250...

The personal attacks are not warranted. When responding to a post here, it is really just good manners to assume that the person who posted the reply is intelligent and...

Just a thought: isn't it possible that a patient can be allergic to a combination of drugs, but not the drugs individually? Would your system handle that combination?

Based on what...

The problem isn't really loading data on unsecured devices, but inside jobs. The corrupt DBA or system admin or whatever can do a heckuva job, much worse than any laptop.

When...

Do they have a trial download? We are struggling with Cognos, these tools are less than optimal, shall we say. There's a decent market opportunity for MS now.

Unfortunately, one of the realizations I came to when creating the dynamic ETL tool was that there is a real limit to how much you can automate metadata maintenance. If...

Handling the metadata was the really big challenge for our DW. 250 trials, each with 30-40 distinct tables, adding a new trial a week, I had to develop a dynamic...

"Stephen, sounds to me that what you have built is not a datawarehouse, rather a collection of source systems (clinical trials) on a level playing field in terms of...

"hopefully, the entire enterprise will be looking at the same number calculated in the same way at a given time"

Sounds great in theory, but it never works out in real...