{"id":65,"date":"2011-03-10T14:56:52","date_gmt":"2011-03-10T14:56:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/62.131.51.129\/wordpress\/?p=65"},"modified":"2011-03-10T14:56:52","modified_gmt":"2011-03-10T14:56:52","slug":"the-tragedy-of-not-usings-dates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/?p=65","title":{"rendered":"The tragedy of not usings dates"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I now work with a financial institute where they took the decision NOT to use date formats\u00a0for data-values. This meant that they use 20110310 to indicate the 10th March 2011. It was possible to use a date format but it was decided to use a numerical format.<\/p>\n<p>Everything goes at a cost. Likewise, misusing a numerical format to store a date value also has its costs. In principle, it is possible to store 20110254 value. It is numerical but this can not be used to store a date. The date 54 February 2011 simply does not exist.<\/p>\n<p>The organisation uses SAS to handle the data. Hence, we need a SAS expression to check whether the numerical value can be used as a date or not. This means that 20110254 must be seen as a non-sensical date value, whereas 20110310 does make sense. The SAS expression to check the validity is: input(put(input(put(EFFECTIVE_DATE, 8.)yymmdd8.).<\/p>\n<p>What is lesson to be learned? [1] use date formats for a date. [2] never\/ ever think about using a numerical format.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I now work with a financial institute where they took the decision NOT to use date formats\u00a0for data-values. This meant that they use 20110310 to indicate the 10th March 2011. It was possible to use a date format but it was decided to use a numerical format. Everything goes at a cost. Likewise, misusing a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nice-to-know"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=65"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=65"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=65"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=65"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}