Posted by Jerry Stuckle on 10/28/07 13:08

larry@portcommodore.com wrote:
> On Oct 27, 11:01 am, Michael Fesser <neti...@gmx.de> wrote:
>> .oO(la...@portcommodore.com)
>>
>>> I prefer to store my dates in YYYYMMDD format on my tables for
>>> compactness and readability
>> This is not a problem as long as a proper date type is used in the table
>> (DATE or DATETIME for example). In MySQL dates are stored as YYYY-MM-DD
>> strings, but YYYYMMDD is also possible in a numeric context.
>>
>>> and worked up a bunch of functions for
>>> working with them
>> Looks pretty complicated. MySQL and PHP have a lot of date functions,
>> which already can do most of that. With properly stored dates such
>> calculations are as easy as adding two integers. MySQL is also able to
>> return Unix timestamps, which can then easily be used with PHP's date
>> functions.
>>
> [snip]
>> You might want to consider to use regular expressions, which makes it
>> very easy to test against different patterns.
>>
>> Micha
>
> For the format, I was thinking of long term or DB agnostic, where I
> may not have MySQL compatible fields, so I went with integer.
>
> As for regular expressions haven't quite got the hang of those yet (at
> least it is all in one place so I can fix it when I do.)
>
>

You should check out the SQL standard. All real RDB's have a DATE type
of some sort, and all I know of are compatible with that standard.

You're just making your job a lot harder.

--
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Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.
jstucklex@attglobal.net
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