Ralph Schindler: “That could work for simpler cases, but it gets complicated p…”

Ralph Schindler @ralphschindlerOct 183d9ae0e

How do you store a date when you don't actually know the date? "Born around 1926" or "died sometime in 1937" doesn't fit neatly into a database date column. I built laravel-edtf to handle fuzzy, approximate, and uncertain dates in Laravel, with Eloquent casts, queryable…

GitHubGitHub - smwks/laravel-edtfContribute to smwks/laravel-edtf development by creating an account on GitHub.

John Beales @jbealesOct 181a7bdd5

Maybe separate billable month/day/year columns, where null represents “unknown”? You could even expand that to add a -variance column to each so you know writhing that column’s number of years/months/days, or a Boolean “approximate” flag for each column.

Ralph Schindler @ralphschindlerOct 181/2

That could work for simpler cases, but it gets complicated pretty quickly. EDTF is an existing standard that handles uncertain dates, approximate dates, ranges, open intervals, and unspecified components. The package uses a JSON column to store the EDTF representation and maintains a normal date column with a best guess, so existing queries and sorting continue to work. No need to invent a schema for all the possible variations. https://www.loc.gov/standards/datetime/

loc.govExtended Date Time Format (EDTF) Specification (Library of Congress)Extended Date Time Format. A supporting xml schema allowing for implementation of element set and is maintained in Network Development and MARC Standards Office, Library of Congress.

23:06 · Oct 18, 2026commit 925bc89

Ralph Schindler @ralphschindlerOct 182/2b656187

That said, if you needed more granular queries against the EDTF data itself, you could always use the RDBMS's native JSON functions. That gives you some flexibility without having to add a bunch of dedicated columns.

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