Question

At the company I work for date and time values have always been stored separately in integer fields, so for example 8:30 this morning would be stored like this:

• date of 20091116 and
• time of 83000 (no leading zeros as it is an integer field)

Whereas the time as I type this the time would be stored like this

• date 20091116
• time 133740

Unfortunately if i would like add a BETWEEN to the WHERE clause of a query it introduces a slight complication.

Currently the system I work on is using a query something like this:

declare @minDate int, @minTime int, @maxDate int, @maxTime int
select @minDate = 20091102
select @minTime = 64841
select @maxDate = 20091105
select @maxTime = 102227

SELECT *
FROM transactions
WHERE
    (
        (
            txnDate = @minDate AND 
            txnTime >= @minTime 
        ) OR 
        txnDate > @minDate
    ) AND
    (
        (
            txnDate = @maxDate AND
            txnTime <= @maxTime
        ) OR
        txnDate < @maxDate
    )

Bearing in mind that I can’t change the design of the database…
Is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

If you are concerned about performance (and thus have indices on txnDate and txnTime), you should use this:

SELECT * FROM transactions
WHERE (txnDate > @minDate AND txnDate < @maxDate)
   OR (txnDate = @minDate AND txnTime >= @minTime)
   OR (txnDate = @maxDate AND txnTime <= @maxTime)

Otherwise, Andomar’s trick with bigint is fine and clear.