Question

I working on a horse racing application and have the need to store elapsed times from races in a table. I will be importing data from a comma delimited file that provides the final time in one format and the interior elapsed times in another. The following is an example:

Final Time: 109.39  (1 minute, 9 seconds and 39/100th seconds)

Quarter Time: 2260  (21 seconds and 60/100th seconds)

Half Time: 4524     (45 seconds and 24/100th seconds)

Three Quarters: 5993   (59 seconds and 93/100th seconds) 

I’ll want to have the flexibility to easily do things like feet per seconds calculations and to convert elapsed times to splits. I’ll also want to be able to easily display the times (elapsed or splits) in fifth of seconds or in hundredths.

Times in fifths: :223  :451  :564      1:091 (note the last digits are superscripts)

Times in hundredths: 22.60  :45.24  :56.93   1:09.39

Thanks in advance for your input.

Answer 1

Generally timespans are either stored as (1) seconds elapsed or (2) start / end datetime. Seconds elapsed can be an integer or a float / double if you require it. You could be creative / crazy and store all times as milliseconds in which case you’d only need an integer.