Re: Fetching record of the day

Hello Gary,

What I would do (everyone on list groans) is store the date as a string in
YYYY-MM-DD
format.  Actually, I always store dates that way.  Should you decide you
want to do that, I have a date validation function I could send you (written
in VB (sorry)).

Good luck
David Boerwinkle

-----Original Message-----
From: Gary Hoffman <ghoffman@ucsd.edu>
To: pgsql-general@postgresql.org <pgsql-general@postgresql.org>
Date: Tuesday, April 04, 2000 12:21 AM
Subject: [GENERAL] Fetching record of the day


>To the PostGresQL mastermind:
>
>Working with postgresql and SQL in general is a blast. However, I need
>advice on how best to form the following query. I'm sure there are a dozen
>different ways to do it. Please give me your suggestion:
>
>I want to publish a "Link of the Day" on my website, with title,
>description, and URL. I have a field named startdate with type of
>datetime, but not all records have this field filled in. In those cases,
>it contains a null.
>
>I would like to retireve the record (there should be only one) whose field
>"startdate" contains today's date. So I only want to test for date, not
>date&time and I also want to ignore the null records. Of course, if it
>works better, I could store the intended startdate in text format or even
>an integer format, if that works better.
>
>So, in general, here's what I want to do:
>
>  select [stuff] from [table] where date(startdate) = date(today)
>
>Several approaches I have tried have all died because of the nulls stored
>in the datetime-type field startdate.
>
>Please suggest a workable solution that you have tested. The best one
>(that works) gets their website listed on my "link of the day". What a
>deal!
>
>Thanks,
>Gary
>
>**************************************************************************
>* Gary B. Hoffman, Computing Services Manager  e-mail: ghoffman@ucsd.edu *
>* Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS) *
>* University of California, San Diego (UCSD)       voice: (858) 534-1989 *
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