Question

I am interested in seeing suggestions for a database design regarding business hours.

It would be quite similar to what Facebook has – alt text http://uploader.ws/upload/200903/widget.png

I have a list of businesses, and I would like for users to be able to input multiple sets of available hours for that business. e.g.,

Monday: open 9-5; Tuesday: open 9-12; 1-5; etc. I would not like to be limited to two sets of hours per day. Ideally, N sets of hours per day. If that’s not practical, no more than 4… no less than 2.

I am interested in the ‘best’ (theoretical) and the most practical solutions.

The DBMS I’m using is MySQL.

Answer 1

How about:

create table business (   id int not null auto_increment primary key,   name varchar(255) );  create table open_hour_range (   id int not null auto_increment primary key,   business_id int,   day_of_week tinyint, /* 0-6 */   open_time time,   close_time time,   foreign key(business_id) references business(id) ); 

This allows you any combination of hours, including multiple per day. However, it may be a bit slow from a querying perspective, in that you’ll need to do a fair amount of joining to come up with the list of what hours a business is open.

Also, if you want to be able to display hours in a format like:

M-F 9-5 Sa-Su 9-12

You’d need to merge similar ranges in code, outside the database. If you wanted this sort merging, you could change day_of_week to a start_day and an end_day.