Some of our choices don't matter as much anymore. It is easy to see the advantage of a date in the format of YYYYMMDD if all we're doing is comparing to see which date is older.
But if we are doing anything more complicated - just send the date to a function library to do the processing. When we do that, my choice of which date format doesn't really matter. We are still designing our SQL calls to be efficient - but the DBAs are working to make the efficiencies behind the scenes. Optimizing compilers are getting smarter, but with power as cheap, all they really need to do is get rid of the most ridiculous programming flaws. Writing files to save space with binary and packed numbers with implicit signs doesn't make sense anymore - space is cheap, make sure it's easy to FTP the data to any computer where it is easy and clear what the data mean. Heck, it might even make sense to store it with all of the overhead of XML (or something). Times change. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
