RIM Based Persistence

This whitepaper is one of a series of whitepapers created by the RIMBAA Work Group. The whitepaper is based on actual HL7 version 3 implementation experiences and aims to document a best practice or an implementation pattern.

Summary

This paper addresses the architecture of a solution which uses the HL7 RIM as a persistence model.

Safe querying of a RIM-based data model is out of scope of this version of the paper.

Note: this paper assumes that the details of RIM attributes are exposed at the persistence layer, i.e. either a RDMBS, an EAV or a mixture of those. Most of its content won't apply as-is to XML databases.

Introduction

Benefits of a RIM based persistence layer.

Persistence Models versus Interoperability Models

See Implementation aspects of RIM based database models: Why not use a DIM (or: a CDA R-MIM) as the basis for persistence?

Persisting concept codes, Use of terminology servers in RIMBAA applications

Physical Database Models

See ORM best practices. Persisting data types. Either ORM or as UDTs.

Context conduction. Context SMIRFs for RIM based relational databases, Object nets versus object trees