OpenAtlas

Great news, the people at the PostgreSQL mailing list (https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/ca438ff8331c4e109aa1b75a130948ac%40oeaw.ac.at) were very friendly and supporting. They are now discussing how this could be implemented and they will maybe do it in 2023. Anyway, it is very nice they take the time looking into it.

Is there any news about this issue? We have finds and sites to track within bITEM that are from 50.000 BC and it is not possible.

In order to find a solution I see some possible ways. Please feel free to add more ideas.

1. We restructure our system and split year, month, day for every date as separate infos (int resp. smallint).

year          INTEGER NOT NULL,
month         SMALLINT CHECK (month BETWEEN 1 AND 12),
day           SMALLINT CHECK (day BETWEEN 1 AND 31)

2. We leave everything as is and just add another field

yearbefore4713          INTEGER NOT NULL,

if a year before 4713bc is entered the value is saved here.
UI resp. backend however must handle checks and validation and not allow days or any other smaller units for dates before -4713 and save the value in the respective field
Also in the manual we should consider to document that every date before this is meant as solar year

For sorting these dates in bITEM or THANADOS I implemented functions that calculate days before present on the fly