I think you can coax the date_trunc function to give you a proper start day. I think it's more than adding an integer to your date, though. You also have to do some mod work after the function returns, I think. I agree that the point isn't that you can't do it with some effort, however. It's mainly that it's a bit linguistically unintuitive. It would be nice to have a start date as an argument to the function.

Having said that, my own personal use of it will definitely be inside another "wrapper" function because I need database platform independence, so I need to abstract the function to look the same on all of my platforms.


Jorge Godoy wrote:
Bruno Wolff III <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

On Thu, Mar 08, 2007 at 20:32:22 -0300,
  Jorge Godoy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Alvaro Herrera <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

As I said, it is easy with a function. :-)  I was just curious to see if we
had something like Oracle's NEXT_DAY function or something like what I
described (SET BOW=4; -- makes Thursday the first day of week):
If you are actually using "date" you can get the effect you want by adding
a constant integer to the date in the date_trunc function. That seems
pretty easy.


I couldn't see where to specify that integer.  Or, if it to sum it up to the
date, something that calculates it automatically.

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.2/interactive/functions-datetime.html#FUNCTIONS-DATETIME-TRUNC

Adding an integer I'd still have to write the verifications (such as the one I
mention below for Oracle's NEXT_DATE()) to get the desired result.


Just to repeat my question:

(I don't want to write a function, I can do that pretty easily...  And I was
asking if there existed some feature on the database that...  It's just a
curiosity)

  Given a date X it would return me the first day of the week so that I can
  make this first day an arbitrary day, e.g. Friday or Wednesday.


Oracle's NEXT_DAY() gets closer to that, but would still require a few
operations (checking if the returned date is before the given date or if after
then subtract one week from this returned value, kind of a
"PREVIOUS_DATE()"...).


With a function I could make it easily, but then I'd have to wrap all
calculations with that...  It was just something to make life easier.  From
the answers I'm getting I see that there's no way to do that without a
function and that I'm not missing any feature on PG with regards to that ;-)



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