PostgreSql - Adding YEar and Month to Table - postgresql

Question

I am creating a Customer table and i want one of the attributes to be Expiry Date of credit card.I want the format to be 'Month Year'. What data type should i use? i want to use date but the format is year/month/day. Is there any other way to restrict format to only Month and year?

Answer 1

You can constrain the date to the first day of the month:
create table customer (
cc_expire date check (cc_expire = date_trunc('month', cc_expire))
);
Now this fails:
insert into customer (cc_expire) values ('2014-12-02');
ERROR: new row for relation "customer" violates check constraint "customer_cc_expire_check"
DETAIL: Failing row contains (2014-12-02).
And this works:
insert into customer (cc_expire) values ('2014-12-01');
INSERT 0 1
But it does not matter what day is entered. You will only check the month:
select
date_trunc('month', cc_expire) > current_date as valid
from customer;
valid
-------
t
Extract year and month separately:
select extract(year from cc_expire) "year", extract(month from cc_expire) "month"
from customer
;
year | month
------+-------
2014 | 12
Or concatenated:
select to_char(cc_expire, 'YYYYMM') "month"
from customer
;
month
--------
201412

Answer 2

Use either
char(5) for two-digit years, or
char(7) for four-digit years.
Code below assumes two-digit years, which is the form that matches all my credit cards. First, let's create a table of valid expiration dates.
create table valid_expiration_dates (
exp_date char(5) primary key
);
Now let's populate it. This code is just for 2013. You can easily adjust the range by changing the starting date (currently '2013-01-01'), and the "number" of months (currently 11, which lets you get all of 2013 by adding from 0 to 11 months to the starting date).
with all_months as (
select '2013-01-01'::date + (n || ' months')::interval months
from generate_series(0, 11) n
)
insert into valid_expiration_dates
select to_char(months, 'MM') || '/' || to_char(months, 'YY') exp_date
from all_months;
Now, in your data table, create a char(5) column, and set a foreign key reference from it to valid_expiration_dates.exp_date.
While you're busy with this, think hard about whether "exp_month" might be a better name for that column than "exp_date". (I think it would.)

Answer 3

As another idea you could essentially create some brief utilities to do this for you using int[]:
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION exp_valid(int[]) returns bool LANGUAGE SQL IMMUTABLE as
$$
SELECT $1[1] <= 12 AND (select count(*) = 2 FROM unnest($1));
$$;
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION first_invalid_day(int[]) RETURNS date LANGUAGE SQL IMMUTABLE AS
$$
SELECT (to_date($1[2]::text || $1[1]::text, CASE WHEN $1[2] < 100 THEN 'YYMM' ELSE 'YYYYMM' END) + '1 month'::interval)::date;
$$;
These work:
postgres=# select exp_valid('{04,13}');
exp_valid
-----------
t
(1 row)
postgres=# select exp_valid('{13,04}');
exp_valid
-----------
f
(1 row)
postgres=# select exp_valid('{04,13,12}');
exp_valid
-----------
f
(1 row)
Then we can convert these into a date:
postgres=# select first_invalid_day('{04,13}');
first_invalid_day
-------------------
2013-05-01
(1 row)
This use of arrays does not violate any normalization rules because the array as a whole represents a single value in its domain. We are storing two integers representing a single date. '{12,2}' is December of 2002, while '{2,12}' is Feb of 2012. Each represents a single value of the domain and is therefore perfectly atomic.