Open Dental Forum

Hi,

I am currently in the process of automating some of our office work and have noticed that there are many unused (for us) columns in the 'claim' table that are marked as not nullable, but also do not have default values.
Would altering the table so that these columns have defaults bork anything internally, or am I safe to go ahead and do this?

Thanks,
Freddie

I wouldn't recommend modifying the schema at all. I am curious as to what columns you say are unused though, could you provide a list?

Ok, glad I asked then.


Columns in the claim table that we do not use, do not have defaults, and can't be nulled:
ReferringProv
ClinicNum
AttachedImages
AttachedModels
(All of the ones that start with 'Canada/Canadian')
SpecialProgramCode
UniformBillType
MedType
AdmissionTypeCode
AdmissionSourceCode
PatientStatusCode
CustomTracking
CorrectionType
OrigRefNum
ProvOrderOverride
OrthoTotalM
ShareOfCost
OrderingReferralNum

To determine what's 'unused' I just ran "select * from claim order by claimnum desc limit 5000" and looked for the columns that didn't change, so some of these might be trivial (sorry for the stupid question if that's the case), but I'm guessing these are features we aren't using.

If it makes any difference, we're from New Zealand so we might not be using the claim system the same way as American users are.

Thanks, Freddie