Re: Non-Unique intems

On Tue, March 28, 2006 8:54 pm, Sean Davis said:

> Unfortunately, the biological data that you are working with has
> one-to-many and many-to-many relationships.  While one would like to
> believe that there should not be such relationships, there are.
> Therefore, you need to store the data in a manner that respects those
> manifold relationships.  In other words, store the data in a table with
> whatever is the primary key (in this case, it looks like an IMAGE ID)
> and store the annotation separately, allowing for a one-to-many
> relationship between IMAGE ID and gene.  There is no way around this and
> to try to eliminate these "non-unique" situations in this particular
> case won't be possible; instead, you have to understand where the data
> are coming from and design your database to match, not the other way
> around.

Summary: It is easier to design databases than to design data. ;)

Daniel T. Staal

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