Uniquely Identify Items in OpenFDA (MAUDE)

Question

Im downloading and processing the complete data of OpenFDA as described in:

• https://open.fda.gov/apis/downloads/
• https://api.fda.gov/download.json

But i could not find a way to uniquely identify the records that i read, as there seems to be no uniqueId for most of the data. Am i right ?

For example:

The Adverse-Events (device.event) does not seem to provide any field, that uniquely identifies a record.

See also:

• https://open.fda.gov/apis/device/event/searchable-fields/

It is very problematic to not have unique-identifiers, because i need to compeletely drop my data and reimport it every month, when i want to import new changes in the OpenFDA to my local database.

Am i really correct, that the data does not have such unique-identifiers?

Answer 1

This varies across the openFDA datasets; most datasets have a field or a combination of fields that could be used to uniquely identify a record. Device Events uses mdr_report_key as the key. Drug Events uses safetyreportid. And so on. I agree the documentation could be more clear on what field(s) is the key for each dataset.