Re: Dates with unknown month and/or day

Hi

I think it is not a very good idea to fill unknown parts of a date with
'1's, unless you introduce a new attribute "precision" or so, where
you store which part (y for year only, m for year/month etc) of your date
really can be taken seriously...

Or you store year/month/day separately. When you want to use a date
function, you concatenate all parts and cast it as a date. This is clean but
more complicated. It depends, how often you need date-functions. Attention:
concatenation with NULL results in NULL, so you need to use coalesce.

Yours,
Chris

-------- Original-Nachricht --------
Von: "Sean Davis"
An: "pg novice"
Betreff: [NOVICE] Dates with unknown month and/or day
Datum: 05/11/07 16:21

What is the best way to treat dates with unknown month and/or day? I
have some historical data that has only year or year/month, while the
newest data has year/month/day. If there is no other option than to set
unknowns to '1', that will work, but I wanted to make sure that
there
was not another way (and I can't see how there could be given the way
that date functions work).

Thanks,
Sean

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