Re: BUG #11883: Year 1500 not treated as leap year when it was a leap year

On 07 Nov 14 10 40, Tom Lane wrote:
> Bruce Hunsaker <hunsakerbn(at)ldschurch(dot)org> writes:
> > Just to add some additional background, We were migrating data from
> > an Oracle DB when we hit this. Oracle's dates are Julian based
> > and range from Jan 1, 4712 BCE to Dec 31 9999 CE. So Feb 29, 1500
> > is a valid date in an Oracle Date type (Julian day 2268992). So I
> > wonder what the rules might be to convert a Julian date to a
> > 'proleptic Gregorian' date (pre 1582) and vice versa?
>
> I think you have a bigger data-integrity problem than you realize.
> Perhaps I'm jumping to conclusions based on your return address,
> but I suppose what you've got here is a database of historical
> birth and death records from lots of different countries? Your
> problem, as I mentioned upthread, is that you're going to need some
> context to figure out whether any given recorded date was meant as
> Julian or Gregorian. If you don't know that for sure, applying a
> transformation that's only going to be right for 80% or 90% of your
> data will make things worse not better.

I was thinking the same thing after my last post.

> In the short term you'd probably be best off just storing the Oracle
> output as text. You could consider converting it to some type with
> stronger semantics later, but you'll have enough on your plate
> making the switch at all.

That's an excellent suggestion. I'm going to advise that we store the
Oracle output as text, so the original value gets preserved.

--
Bruce Hunsaker

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