Re: [libdb-develop] Dates In An RDBMS - Years Only?

[Ed S. <eh...@po...>]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2004 at 11:28:58AM -0500, Morbus Iff wrote:
>  * all dates not related to a person or corporate body are years.
>  * all dates related to a person or corporate body must be yyyy-mm-dd.
> 
> In MySQL, at least, there's no "proper" way to represent a YYYY or 
> YYYY-MM-DD in *one* column: we'd end up with stuff like "1999-00-00", which 
> seems rather evil to me (or is it? let me know your thoughts.)

Is it forseeable that you might have a date assigned to an item, like 
Jimi Hendrix Live At Woodstock? If not, then I guess this distinction could
work.

I guess I don't see it as particuarly evil to have 1999-00-00 in the db, if 
the display code knows that it needs to reformat the date. Especially 
since 1999-07-04 may have to be reformatted as well :) 

//Ed