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Comment by clay_to_n | Hacker News Reader

It's an old-looking website, but I've found this site has some really cool data models: http://www.databaseanswers.org/data_models/index.htm

As someone in the healthcare space, looking at some of these models gives me a better idea of how various aspects of the healthcare industry work, and the things they interact with. Ex) http://www.databaseanswers.org/data_models/patient_data_ware...

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I was just about to post this. I've been referring to this site for years all the way since University days. Invaluable resource! Thanks for posting!

That healthcare industry data model is very simplistic and would not be adequate for the majority of real world use cases involving patient visits. If you have to model something in the healthcare domain then don't reinvent the wheel. Start with the HL7 RIM, and then constrain it down to what you really need.

https://www.hl7.org/implement/standards/product_brief.cfm?pr...

Good point! I've yet to dig into HL7 myself, so thanks for the link.

I think that after you posted this, it caused a surge of traffic to that website, which caused the server to crash lol.

Thanks for this, so much information here.

those models are actually pretty bad

the ones in these books are better:

https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/12991/ready-to-use-d...

This strikes me as a very unhelpful comment. Why are they bad? Why are the ones in these books better?

The site (databaseanswers) is neat and I've gotten some good ideas from it in the past, but most of the models (that I've looked at anyway) are pretty simple and you almost really wouldn't need to look at a diagram drawn by somebody else to intuitively put something like that together. It seems almost more for someone creating MS Access level applications. Granted there may be some more complex schemas that I didn't see.

There might be an argument about excessive normalization in some cases also. Take some of those layouts too far and try to extend them and you might wind up with tons of little tables. Normalization was I think more important back in those days (not that it's not still important... but some of the downsides of going overboard on normalization have become apparent I think.... at least to me).

It's really mixed. The models on the site I posted are from a variety of places, so some are higher quality than others.

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