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 genealogy program has figured it out; maybe it's source code can lend you some clues.