Normalising the names of remedies

RemedyNotes first went live in February, 2013 and here I am almost 6 months later and I have finally got to the point of launching version 3.

When I first started designing RemedyNotes, I quickly became aware of how complex this simple thing of keeping well indexed notes could be. And I was keen to keep things as simple as possible. So I quite consciously transgressed one of the basic rules of database design and I failed to fully 'normalise the data'.

Now, the idea of normalising data is that you should take things apart until they are in the simplest state possible. But that will usually mean creating yet more tables. And I wanted to keep things simple.

The result was that I fudged things - specifically the whole issue of the name of the remedy. For Homeopaths it will seem nornal that a remedy has a formal name - for example, Natrum muriaticum - and a remedy abbreviation - Nat-m. - and it might also have a common name - in this case, table salt.

But as I started to gather the underlying list of 4,600+ remedies, it became very clear that there was in fact no agreement on the formal name or the abbreviation or the common name. So I started to create very long remedy names incorporating all the possible names. But I did assume that every remedy would at least have an abbreviation and I designed the system to use that abbreviation as the basic hook on which to index the records.

And then I picked up Jan Scholten's book "Wonderful Plants" which introduces a huge number of remedies and it has absolutely no abbreviations !

So I have bitten the bullet and in version 3 I have added a new table for remedy names and I have included in it the formal names, the abbreviations and the common names. It won't make much difference to you the user, but it makes all sorts of things much easier for me as your technical support !

As well as that, there are redesigns and refinements to the sharing facility. You will still be able to share your data with other RemedyNotes users, but the technical details of how that will happen have been simplified and stream-lined.

It is a huge relief to be at the point of launching version 3.

If you don't yet have RemedyNotes, please get your free demo copy from www.remedynotes.co.uk

If you are already a user, please let me know how you are getting on and if you need help upgrading to version 3, email me at john@remedynotes.co.uk.

All the very best

John