Re: "order by" days of the week

On Sat, 2002-09-28 at 02:36, D. A. wrote:
> I am storing a schedule of services in a restaurant database (e.g.
> breakfast, lunch...), and want to be able to order the results by the day
> of the week. The table is as follows.
>
>                 Table "schedule"
>    Column    |          Type          | Modifiers
> -------------+------------------------+-----------
>  business_id | integer                | not null
>  day         | character varying(20)  |
>  start       | time without time zone |
>  finish      | time without time zone |
>  service     | character varying(30)  |
>
> The day collumn will hold the days of the week "Monday", "Tuesday"... etc.
> When I retrieve the data, I want to be able to sort by the days in
> cronological order rather than in alphabetic order.
>
> My questions are these:
> 1) Is it possible to use "order by" in conjunction with a list of strings
> to tell it how to order the results?

You could write a function to convert day names into numbers and sort on
the output of that function.

> 2)Is there a way to store days of the week that is better than simply
> using varchar and performing a check. I read about the time data formats
> and they all seem to be more applicable to absolute times rather than
> simply a day of the week. I also thought about storing the days as a
> number between 1 and 7 then converting for display (1=Monday,
> 2=Tuesday...), but that didn't feel clean to me.

It seems cleaner to me.  It would take less storage and be easier to
validate ("CONSTRAINT "valid day" CHECK (day >= 0 AND day < 7)").
Create a view that has an additional dayname column defined as "CASE
WHEN day = 0 THEN "Sunday" WHEN day = 1 THEN "Monday" ... END"  Then you
can sort by day but select dayname.

--
Oliver Elphick                                Oliver.Elphick@lfix.co.uk
Isle of Wight, UK
http://www.lfix.co.uk/oliver
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