> I do see that you're working with genealogy, I don't even follow your
> calendar reasoning.
>
> However, assuming the simple bits that I thought was the Julian
> calendar (leapyears every 4th year, except those ending in 00 which is
> not divisible by 400), I think the calendar should repeat itself every
> 2800 years. Hence, if you add 5600 years to each and every value, you
> should be able to store dates from before the beginning of
> 'Astronomical calculations' (1 January 4713 BC) to about 2395 years
> from now. Before then, I expect Firebird 5 to have been released, and
> I'm certain a solution to your date problem will have been found.

If it only was that easy :-)

During the years, sometimes a couple of days have gone "missing".

And depending on where you live, this could have happened sooner
or later. eg, the Russian October Revolution is celebrated in November,
I believe, because 2 weeks are gone :-) ... Or the other way around,
for that matter.

And the Russians were years later with adjusting their calendar compared
to others... So this all makes "date" a rather strange thingy :-)

With regards,

Martijn Tonies
Database Workbench - developer tool for InterBase, Firebird, MySQL & MS SQL
Server
Upscene Productions
http://www.upscene.com