"order by" days of the week

From: "D(dot) A(dot)" <lameije(at)yahoo(dot)com>
To: pgsql-novice(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: "order by" days of the week
Date: 2002-09-28 01:36:01
Message-ID: 20020928013601.78456.qmail@web13803.mail.yahoo.com
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Hello,

I am storing a schedule of services in a restaurant database (e.g.
breakfast, lunch...), and want to be able to order the results by the day
of the week. The table is as follows.

Table "schedule"
Column | Type | Modifiers
-------------+------------------------+-----------
business_id | integer | not null
day | character varying(20) |
start | time without time zone |
finish | time without time zone |
service | character varying(30) |

The day collumn will hold the days of the week "Monday", "Tuesday"... etc.
When I retrieve the data, I want to be able to sort by the days in
cronological order rather than in alphabetic order.

My questions are these:
1) Is it possible to use "order by" in conjunction with a list of strings
to tell it how to order the results?

2)Is there a way to store days of the week that is better than simply
using varchar and performing a check. I read about the time data formats
and they all seem to be more applicable to absolute times rather than
simply a day of the week. I also thought about storing the days as a
number between 1 and 7 then converting for display (1=Monday,
2=Tuesday...), but that didn't feel clean to me.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Doug

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