st: Re:date fields

[Kit Baum <baum@bc.edu>]

Quite so. Relational databases such as mySQL have three types of  
columns: numeric, string and date/time. For mySQL, " The date and  
time types for representing temporal values are DATETIME, DATE,  
TIMESTAMP, TIME, and YEAR. Each temporal type has a range of legal  
values, as well as a “zero” value that is used when you specify an  
illegal value that MySQL cannot represent. "

Since Stata does not have such variable types, any movement of data  
between RDBMS and Stata requires some tweaking to ensure that the  
contents are preserved as meant.

Kit Baum, Boston College Economics
http://ideas.repec.org/e/pba1.html


On Sep 28, 2005, at 2:33 AM, statalist-digest wrote:


> For Stata, date variables are not a variable type,
> or a set of variable types. Dates are held as integer-valued
> numeric variables and the date part works through formats
> and functions.

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