🚀 go-pugleaf

I think I may have found a solution.  I have stumbled across a function, 
EXTRACT.

select * from CONTACTS where EXTRACT (DAY from CBIRTHDAY) > 1
select * from CONTACTS where EXTRACT (MONTH from CBIRTHDAY) > 1
select * from CONTACTS where EXTRACT (YEAR from CBIRTHDAY) > 1950

What worries me though is execution time.  If I had say 500,000 contacts in 
this table, would it have to brute-force (for-loop) its way through all 
these records extracting the month and day from each Contact's birthdate?

If I created seperate fields BirthMonth and BirthDay (Integers) I could 
index on them, and make sure execution time is fast.  If I have the the 
Contact's Birthday field (CBIRTHDAY) indexed, will execution time be fast? 
(I'm under the impression that Date fields are stored as Double/Floating 
point numbers, and indexing them puts them in order by linear time.   I 
don't see how these queries (listed above) could extract the Month or Day 
values from the date field without looking at each individual Birthdate, 
each and every time this query runs... I don't think we want to do that.)

Thanks again everyone,
- Jason

"Jason Summers" <jason@grinc.org> wrote in message 
news:4726a766@newsgroups.borland.com...
> Hello Everyone,
>
> I have an Interbase database which stores Contacts, and one of the fields 
> is the Birthdate, of type TIMESTAMP.  I need to be able to query all 
> Contacts with birthdates in a particular season (Spring, Fall, Winter, 
> Summer)
>
> Since the years of the birthdates vary, I cannot do a simple  'where date 
>  > X and date < X'.   Is there a way where I can ignore the Year, and just 
> query where Birthdate's Month/Date is of certain values?
>
> If this cannot be done, I will add a field called 'Birth Month' and 'Birth 
> Date', but it seems to be cleaner if I don't add this redundant data.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> - Jason