Re: Storing birthday data

Christopher Petrilli wrote:
>>What would be the more proper way of storing birthday data? It will be
>>used to send out birthday messages for customers ("Happy 30th birthday,
>>Sam!"). But the date of birth is not necessarily known (in which case,
>>we will only send out "Happy birthday, Sam!").
>>
>>I prefer using the builtin date type instead of three smallints. But I
>>don't like having to arbitrarily set, say, year 1000 AD or 1 BC to
>>represent "unknown year".
>
> Well if you make the column nullable, then you can detect that when
> you retreive it.

Which column? If I use a single date column and set it nullable, I won't
be able to say "date of month and month is known, but year is unknown".

Anyway, I think I'll go with the single date column way.

> You could also, if you don't want that, use a second
> column to indicate that it's been set.

--
dave