Re: I am writing a MS SQL server conversion utility and am having an issue with timestamp

On Fri, Jan 14, 2005 at 04:15:02PM -0500, Joel Fradkin wrote:

> Any one have a good idea for dealing with a timestamp where only time is
> available on some of the source records?

TIMESTAMP values contain a date and time.  If you have only times
then they'll have to go in a TIME column or you'll have to use a
bogus date in a TIMESTAMP column (ugly).

> Some records have both time and day.
>
> My MSSQL database has 290 tables so splitting the fields would be a very
> large project.

Couldn't a conversion be done programatically?  Or are there too
many special cases that need wetware intervention?

> Is there a way to add just the time part of date time to timestamp?

Not that I'm aware of.  Unless I'm mistaken you'll have to use
separate DATE and TIME columns and set the date to NULL, else assign
a bogus date where the date is missing, which wouldn't smell very
nice.

-- 
Michael Fuhr
http://www.fuhr.org/~mfuhr/