strawberry wrote:

> I'm creating a table of objects, including their year of manufacture.
> In some cases the year of manufacture will be very precise, '1855',
> say. In other cases the year will be much more vague - 'circa 1830',
> '1780 - 1820' or even 'early 19th century'. Indeed, as the objects get
> more ancient, I can well imagine that their ages become much less
> precise. Just wondered if anyone had any suggestions about ways of
> storing this kind of information.


I presume you wish to search by date at some point.

Perhaps store a mid-point and a range.

So 1780-1820 would be mid-point = 1800, range = 20 (i.e. +/- 20 years from
mid-point).

Then you can query it using mid-point - range and mid-point + range.


--
Brian Wakem
Email: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/b.wakem/myemail.png