Re: Temporal Questions

On Mon, 30 Apr 2007, Aaron Burt wrote:

> PGSQL certainly has functions that can tell you what day of the week or
> year it is. As for holidays, which ones apply? I think it'd be wonderful
> if someone maintained tables of gov't holidays for the US, Canada, the EU,
> Japan, all 50 States and all 13 Territories and Provinces, not to mention
> banks, major business and trading entities.

Governments take holidays on the slightest excuse. Having them in a table
is not necessary for our application. I think that having a table of
Julianized dates for the current and next few years would make temporal
calculations easier.

One of the major queries to be run is identifying renewal and reporting
dates in the next defined period (fortnight or month, most likely). That
means comparing an issue date and duration (or other regularly scheduled
period) with the calendar date two weeks or a month in advance. This
temporal math is a new venture for me so it will take a while to learn the
most effective ways of getting the needed results.

> My own take? Let the customer figure out their own dang holidays; just
> make it easy to enter them in.

The only concern with holidays is that's when govenment agencies are
closed. But, _our_ clients are smart enough to work around all this on their
own. :-) Heck, that's what they've been doing all along.

Rich

--
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D. | The Environmental Permitting
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. | Accelerator(TM)
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com> Voice: 503-667-4517 Fax: 503-667-8863