Feature:90062

90062 OPEN We need to add support for Works that were written prior to 1 AD, e.g. Plato's Timaios. Currently, the ISFDB software interprets "-370-00-00" or "370BC" as an invalid date and stores it as 0000-00-00. Ahasuerus 14:27, 19 Jun 2006 (CDT)

Well, after looking at the reference manual, it turns out that MySQL only supports the years 1000 to 9999. If the restriction went down to year zero, then we could easily add a "BC bit", but the problem is worse in that we're missing a whole millenium as well (I tried 950AD and it worked, but 50AD came out 2050AD). We could allocate part of the year space (like the upper 2 millenium), but aside from being hacky, what will we do after our Nth rejuv treatments, and the year 8000 rolls around? I suppose we could have a "pre 1000 AD bit" in the table structures, and do some interesting date manipulations. Not terribly difficult for storage and display, but fairly problematic for searching. Alvonruff 19:49, 11 Jul 2006 (CDT)

A quick Web search confirms that there is no out of the box fix for MySQL's "Y1K problem". One poster even suggested switching to PostgreSQL when you project requires robust date support for dates between 4000BC - 1000 AD :( How painful would it be to convert regular MySQL dates to a custom "Julian date" datatype? Unless it's much easier than I suspect it will be, we may want to move it to the end of the list for now. Ahasuerus 09:51, 12 Jul 2006 (CDT)