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DustinMichaels
Constraint Violating Yak Guru
464 Posts |
 Posted - 2004-11-29 : 13:17:35
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| Hi guys. Currently I'm working on a database conversion 2 personnel systems. In the old system they store peoples birthdates with an integer column. Some of the birth dates are invalid (for example someone had a value of 0 for their birthdate), so I had to use the IsDate function to convert bad birthdates to a "default" birthday. It seems to me that it would of been easier to do the data conversion if the old system used a date/time column for the birthdate field.From reading BOL it says that SQL Server stores dates as 2 integers so other than saving storage space why would anyone want to use an integer column to store dates??Dustin Michaels |
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X002548
Not Just a Number
15586 Posts |
Posted - 2004-11-29 : 13:25:33
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| because they believe they are rocket scientists...What do the Numbers look like?Like this?DECLARE @x datetimeSELECT @x = '1/1/1970'SELECT CONVERT(Int,@x)Brett8-) |
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DustinMichaels
Constraint Violating Yak Guru
464 Posts |
Posted - 2004-11-29 : 13:31:00
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| The numbers where in this form yyyymmdd. After I converted all the bad dates to some default value then the information was converted over with one query. |
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jen
Master Smack Fu Yak Hacker
4110 Posts |
Posted - 2004-11-30 : 12:28:27
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probably it was easier for them to query numbers than dates? like you don't have to use datediff to add or subtract dates from one another, you'll get equal length.  --------------------keeping it simple... |
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Storing dates as an Integer