Re: Temporal Questions

On Thu, May 03, 2007 at 08:37:39AM -0700, Rich Shepard wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Apr 2007, Aaron Burt wrote:
>
> >PGSQL certainly has functions that can tell you what day of the week or
> >year it is. As for holidays, which ones apply? I think it'd be wonderful
> >if someone maintained tables of gov't holidays for the US, Canada, the EU,
> >Japan, all 50 States and all 13 Territories and Provinces, not to mention
> >banks, major business and trading entities.
>
> Governments take holidays on the slightest excuse. Having them in a table
> is not necessary for our application. I think that having a table of
> Julianized dates for the current and next few years would make temporal
> calculations easier.

Yes, I got that the first time. Which ones apply, though? If a client
misses a deadline by 1 day because they're dealing with a state that
doesn't recognize Martin Luther King Day, YOU are in trouble, unless you
place the onus on THEM to get it right.

> One of the major queries to be run is identifying renewal and reporting
> dates in the next defined period (fortnight or month, most likely). That
> means comparing an issue date and duration (or other regularly scheduled
> period) with the calendar date two weeks or a month in advance. This
> temporal math is a new venture for me so it will take a while to learn the
> most effective ways of getting the needed results.

Did you look at the link I Googled for you and gave?

> >My own take? Let the customer figure out their own dang holidays; just
> >make it easy to enter them in.
>
> The only concern with holidays is that's when govenment agencies are
> closed. But, _our_ clients are smart enough to work around all this on their
> own. :-) Heck, that's what they've been doing all along.

My point exactly. You don't want the liability for missed deadlines.