Re: How to setup default value "0000-00-00" for "date"

Hi,

On Fri, 20 Aug 2004, Richard Huxton wrote:

> Emi Lu wrote:
>> Hello all,
>>
>> I have a question about "date" & "timestamp" types in PostgreSQL. I want
>> to setup the default value '0000-00-00' and "0000-00-00 00:00:00" for
>> them. However, it seems that PostgreSQL does not support it. Could someone
>> helps me please?
>
> PostgreSQL doesn't and almost certainly never will support "0000-00-00" as a
> date. That's because it isn't a valid date. You also can't store 13.723,
> "Hello world" or (12,13) in a date column either.
>
> Where you don't have a valid date to store you should use NULL. This business
> of storing zeroes is a horrible MySQL design mistake.

which is because the last time when I last used mysql it did not support
NULLs in indexed columns (at least not in myisam tables).

The workaround was to use something else like 0 to represent undefined
values....  Horrible ...

Greetings
Christian

--
Christian Kratzer                       ck@cksoft.de
CK Software GmbH                        http://www.cksoft.de/
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