CST 363 Week 5

    I spent most of my school time this week designing the prescription database for lab 18. I initially intended for each entity to contain all of the information that was requested on each registration form. I then realized that much of the information on the forms was redundant and every line did not need to be an attribute for that entity. For example, new prescription forms ask for a patient's name. To adhere to normal form, a patient's attributes would only need to be recorded on the patient table. 

    After this I spent some time figuring out how I could count the number of fills per prescription. One way I found in my research for this problem was to create a trigger before inserts. If this ends up not working as I hope, I will try to count records using another approach.

 If indexes are supposed to speed up performance of query,  what does the author mean by a slow index? 

    The index itself is not slow. Operations following the tree traversals can cause the slow index. If matching key entries are repeated, the following tree node(s) must be read as well. Additionally, each table access following each hit can slow down operations as well. Unlike the tree traversal step of an index lookup, following the leaf node chain and accessing table data have no upper bound for the amount of blocks accessed.

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