Joe,
Forget trying to save the computer work. Even a cheap PC can perform
BILLIONS of instructions per second. You literally cannot see the time
difference caused by making the computer do a bit of extra work.
Go back and read Rudy's first suggestion - if the dates are stored as a date
you can do a simple SQL SELECT to pull out records where the month and day
match the ones you're looking for.
Rule numbers 1 thru 10 are KEEP IT SIMPLE
That's simple for *you* - not for the computer that spends 99.99% of its
time waiting for you to type something in.
Calculate the month and day you want to find then:
SELECT * FROM table WHERE
DATEPART(mm, dateofbirth) = $month AND
DATEPART(dd, dateofbirth) = $day;
(That's for SQL Server, probably a different function for mySQL but same
principle)
Database engines are amazingly quick at running a function like that, even
with tens of thousands of records to search, because a database is designed
and built for that very purpose and reason. Trust me, your page won't be
waiting to load for more than an extra hundredth of a second for running
that query.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Joseph Harris" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, July 01, 2005 10:55 AM
Subject: [wdvltalk] Birthday data recovery
I am still finding the suggestions so far, and any scripts I have been able
to find, don't address what I want - not efficiently anyway.
DATE_FORMAT()
will convert to useable data from DATE or DATETIME, but then this has to
be
processed again to extract the instances of the date required. That
might
be ok for a couple of hundred records.
But let us say there are 10,000; I want all the emails of 1/365th of the
entries each day. There will be nothing else I want to do with the
birthdata. So, despite rudy's insistence, I still think that three
columns - year, month, day - will enable much more rapid extraction and
avoid confusion with the year.
AmI wrong, or is it just a matter of preferences (i.e will I trip up with
my
idea?).
Joseph
Joseph Harris
www.smilepoetryweekly.com
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