On Apr 25, 2:18 am, Chad Hanna <c...@chadhanna.co.uk> wrote:
> 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 store the start and end years as integers. This makes comparison with
> another potentially overlapping period reasonably straightforward.
>
> Chad
>
> --
> Chad Hanna
> Systems Developer FamilyHistoryOnlinewww.familyhistoryonline.net
> FreeBSD Apache MySQL Perl mod_perl PHP

Brian, Chad,

Thanks for the suggestions - I think the idea of a mid-point and
tolerance will be the simplest for me to maintain.

Cheers