Re: DOMAIN/composite TYPE vs. base TYPE

On 9/28/20 4:31 PM, Joe Abbate wrote:
> Hello Rob,
>
> On 28/9/20 17:17, Rob Sargent wrote:
>> just record all three fields (day, month, year) with nulls and do the
>> to-date as needed.
>
> That is not sufficient.  An earlier implementation had something like a
> CHAR(8) to record YYYYMMDD, but how can you indicate, for example, an
> issue date of a bimonthly magazine, say July-Aug 2020?  We can store
> 2020-07-01 in the DATE attribute, but we need another attribute to
> indicate it's really two months.  Also, by storing three separate columns,
> you loose the beauty of the PG DATE abstraction.

The Gramps <https://gramps-project.org/blog/> genealogy program has figured
it out; maybe it's source code can lend you some clues.

--
Angular momentum makes the world go 'round.