[Babase] Rankdate Changes in Babase
Karl O. Pinc
kop at meme.com
Fri Mar 19 15:15:12 EDT 2010
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
More information about the Babase
mailing list