[Babase] Rankdate Changes in Babase
Jeanne Altmann
altj at princeton.edu
Fri Mar 19 15:25:55 EDT 2010
-----Original Message-----
From: babase-bounces at eeblistserv.princeton.edu
[mailto:babase-bounces at eeblistserv.princeton.edu] On Behalf Of Karl O.
Pinc
Sent: Friday, March 19, 2010 3:15 PM
To: The Baboon Database Project
Subject: Re: [Babase] Rankdate Changes in Babase
On 03/19/2010 01:48:28 PM, Lacey Maryott Roerish wrote:
> Susan, (et al)
>
> Jeanne, Karl, Niki and I just finished discussing how to handle
> some
> recent issues discovered in babase related to Rankdates. It can be
> difficult to extract number of males on a given date if some males
> rankdates
> occur in the middle of the month. For this reason, I will be
> changing all
> rankdates (Both BY and ON) to the beginning on the month using a
> function
> Karl had previously developed. This will simply make querying
> easier,
> and
> will also sync up rankdates data with actual rank data, which are all
> recorded on the 1st of the month.
We will also then put a rule in requiring that rankdates.rnkdate be
on the first of the month. (Once Lacey let's me know she's done
changing the data.)
The problem has been that nobody ever uses the rnkdate() function,
which sets a date to the first of the month, when comparing
ranks.rnkdate with rankdates.ranked. They'll still have to use this
function when doing arbitrary date comparisons against either
ranks.rnkdate or, now, rankdates.ranked so we're not really
making the problem go away, but are pushing it farther to the
fringes. In any case the ranks.rnkdate/rankdate.ranked problem
has been discussed every few years so it's clear there's a
problem there that this change will make go away.
Karl <kop at meme.com>
Free Software: "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
Agreed; it will remain a potentially valuable function that we need to
remember the situations you note. However, with the proposed change, we
will have the ranked-by date regularized, which is good, and we will
make moot the most common use for the function. Thanks Karl for the
patient reminder about the function and all for brainstorming on the
various issues.
jeanne
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