Hi Guys

I am confused &/or confounded by the replies to Goutam Patuchuri's original
post, answered below by Ann H where she states:
"17 November 1858 as the base of FB's DATE"
Then Alexandre Benson Smith in his reply states:
"12/30/1899 00:00:00 (IIRC) is the "zero" date/time"
& to quote from Helen Borrie's definitive (& very well written) The Firebird
Book, Chapter 10, Date & Time Types
DATE (second paragraph, pp 143)
"In dialect 3, DATE stores the date alone, with no time portion:
"date-only." Storable dates range from January 1, 0001, to December 31,
9999."

Now 01/01/0001 seems logical but hasn't Ann worked with FB/IB before the
proverbial "Adam was a boy"?
Can someone verify what the correct answer is so I can start recording my
family tree (using FB) back to Roman times without getting errors (just
joking but curious!)

Regards
Ken A Galbraith

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ann W. Harrison [mailto:aharrison@...]
> Sent: Wednesday, 17 November 2004 9:46 AM
> To: firebird-support@yahoogroups.com; firebird-support@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: Re: [firebird-support] Firebird timestamp data type..
>
>
> At 05:39 PM 11/16/2004, Goutam Paruchuri wrote:
>
> >Iam converting mysql to Firebird.
> >In mysql i have the default timestamp as 0000-00-00 00:00:00'
>
> That's one of the unique qualities of MySQL - their casual attitude
> toward datatypes. Most calendar systems consider month zero to be
> an out of range value - not, of course, the unix time structure, but
> few of us make plans for the 0th of the month and for most of us,
> January is month 1, not month zero.
>
> Use a legal date value as your default, or null. The system
> base data is 17 November 1858.
>
>
> Regards
>
>
> Ann
>