Topic > broad, to see a specialist, the patient needs approval from his or her primary care doctor; to order a prescription the patient must have at least one valid refill left, and so on. Now, what are the main database user groups? Patients should be able to access the database using a Web browser to order prescriptions and schedule appointments. That's all patients can do in the database. Doctors and nurses can view information about their patients, write and refill prescriptions, schedule blood tests and x-rays, and so on. Administrative staff (receptionists, pharmacy assistants) can schedule patient appointments, fill prescriptions and run specific reports. Again, in real life this database would be much more complicated and have many more business rules, but our main goal now is just to give a general idea of the type of information a database might contain. Healthcare provider and order management system databases are both examples of a typical hybrid database (although the former is probably closer to an OLTP). Scientific database A database for genome research and related research areas in molecular and cellular biology can be a good example of a scientific database. It contains gene catalogs for fully sequenced genomes and some partial genomes, genomic maps and information about organisms, as well as data on sequence similarities between all known genes in all organisms in the database. It also contains information about molecular interaction networks in the cell and about chemical compounds and reactions. This database has only one user group: all researchers have the same access to all information. This is an example of a data warehouse. Nonprofit Organization Database A classic car club database can be quite simple. Additionally, such an organization typically won't have too many members, so the database won't be very large. It is necessary to store members' personal information such as address, telephone number, area of interest and so on. The database may also contain information about cars (make, year, color, condition, etc.). Cars are tied to their owners (club members). Each member can own one or more vehicles and a vehicle can only be owned by one member. The database would have only a few users: possibly the club president, an assistant and a secretary. The last two examples are not business-critical databases and should not be deployed on expensive enterprise software. The data still needs to be stored securely and shouldn't be lost, but in the event of, say, a hardware failure it can probably wait a day or two for the database to be restored from a backup. Please note: This is just an example. Get a custom article from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay So, using a free database, such as mySQL, PostgreSQL, or even non-relational Posgres is appropriate. Another good choice would be MS Access, which is part of Microsoft Office Tools; if you bought MS Office just because you want to use Word and Excel, know that you also get a free relational database. (MS Access works well with up to 15 users.)
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