Re: Storing a "fuzzy date"

"Michael G. Schneider" <mgs_at_mgs-software.de> schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:a533dk$t6$02$1_at_news.t-online.com...
> With Oracle 8.1.7
>
> In my application I would like to support a "fuzzy date". The database
> should not only hold specific dates (as e.g. Feb 20th 2002), but also
> month/year-based dates as "Feb 2002" or just "2002".

Sorry, if my question hasn't been clear enough. I was mostly thinking about how to store this data in a the database. Two ideas come to my mind:

[1] A normal DATE column plus an CHAR(1) column describing, whether the DATE column describes a dd.mm.yyyy or a mm.yyyy or a yyyy.

[2] A CHAR(10) column holding data as "2002-02-21" or "2002-02" or "2002", where the column is self explaining and does not need an additional column.

So question is: has anybody developed an application with this kind of "fuzzy date"? Did you choose [1] or [2] or maybe something different?

Michael G. Schneider Received on Fri Feb 22 2002 - 04:02:15 CST