Hello,
I often create a database with year fields. The question is : what data type would you use ? Text, number or date/time.
And what are the advantages/inconvenients?
Thanks alot,
Tachyophan

If all you are storing is the year, I would personally just use a number.

Mike
EchoVue.com

I had heard that the rule of thumb is if you are not carrying out arithmetic functions on a number value, that the default field type is text, even if you will always be storing a number in the field.

Usually you would seperate dates into Year, Month and Day in the old server databases. IMHO, I would make this a date field and then pull the year value as needed from mm/dd/yyyy. Even if it is a text field, you can still do DateDiff operations if you date the field when carrying out the function.

HTH

mmcdonal

For me the answer is it depends on my application (perhaps there is a theoretical best). If I am going to write an app that contains alot of uses of number of days between events (datediff) than I will store in a date format. If I am importing or exporting data from outsides sources I will often use the format of those sources, ie if my data comes in text, I use text, if date then date etc.

If I have a fair number of records I need to sort on months, I tend to use numbers so that I can easily sort them in order. I also have a tendency to use 2 seperate fields, one for month and one for years. Seems to make the coding easier as I have to use fewer formulas etc. (Assuming the app is simple and I typically run most of my reports on a monthly basis)

I guess it depends on what you do most often with this data. DO you have any other questions, Tachyophan?

mmcdonal