Re: Question: How will the Year 2000 bug impact your work?

On Thu, 17 Oct 1996 20:08:23 -0700, Kim Schludecker <ottoette@earthlink.net> posted: >Didn't I learn at Progress school that you can set the century to start >at 1980 and end at 2079 or some such thing? Thereby eliminating four >digit years? Sure. Kludge away. But if you've got a system that has to represent peoples' birthdates, you'll be up a creek without a paddle. If you have to represent acquisition dates for assets that might be 20 years old, trouble happens. 2 digits (with kludges) only functions if the entire period potentially represented by the system provably lies within a single 100 year period. And you've got to do a lot of testing to make sure that *all* logic paths use the kludge. And with increasing integration of computer systems, there's liable to be *something* connected to the system that needs to know which century it is. And then you're back to having to translate the dates. It costs an extra 33% in disk space for those *fields* that represent dates. Which probably only results in a few percent bloat for the average database record. A few percent *just isn't significant* in light of the problems that are caused by not including the extra data. -- Christopher B. Browne, cbbrowne@unicomp.net, chris_browne@sdt.com Web: http://www.conline.com/~cbbrowne SAP Basis Consultant, UNIX Guy Windows NT - How to make a 100 MIPS Linux workstation perform like an 8 MHz 286