On Wed, Oct 16, 2002 at 08:34:44AM -0400, Ronan Heffernan wrote:
>
> > You may find this to be a minor issue. But as long as you are recording
> the
> >date in any field, you may well come to a point where you wish to sort on
> >that date field. And when that happens, you will wish you had followed the
> >ISO standard on how to write the date, which is YYYYMMDD, thus your dates
> >in the example would be 19890323 and 19890214. This will give an
> unambiguous
> >sort even across century boundaries; years, then months, then days. In
> >additon it resolves the ambiguity between European and US format (is it
> >April 7 or 7 April) which some in Europe try to 'fix' by calling it 7 IV
> >w_h_i_c_h of
> >course doesn't work in an all-numerical date field. Bob F
> >
>
> Paul,
> The SQL standard calls for several kinds of date field (date,
> datetime, timestamp), and PostgreSQL supports all of these. The dates
> are stored in a binary structure, not in a text field, and all SQL
> queries that call for an "order by" sort on the date field will be
> sorted correctly. You can even specify an environment variable that
> controls how the dates will be displayed, but the formatting that you
> choose will have no impact on the sort-order for the date fields.
>
> --ronan
>
Just for the record, this isn't my project; it's Russell Hires'. I just
happened to be the first and perhaps most opinionated respondent. ;-}
Paul
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