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On 15/12/2009, at 11:53 PM, Glenn Hopwood wrote:

If you use numeric fields for your dates I think mmddyy has a more
'natural' sort then ddmmyy.

Only true within a given year. As soon as your dates span multiple years any so-called sort using MMDDYY is messed up (unless you WANT to group the same months together). Of course, DDMMYY is effectively unsortable anyway so I suppose there's a weird logic that MMDDYY is somehow better than DDMMYY.

The only sensible numeric date formats for a database field is YYYYMMDD, CYYMMDD if you're strapped for space), or a day number from a given reference point (hopefully further back than 1900-01-01).

With the database using a Scaliger number to represent dates the visual format no longer matters as much although I think database date fields should be *ISO. Convert them for display or print purposes.

I never understood why MMDDYY became so popular in the US. That sequence of month number, day number, and year only makes sense when written in text form (e.g., November 11, 1918) or when spoken (e.g, August Fourteenth, Nineteen Forty Five). Even so, to many of us in the rest of the world that's still an odd format and the day of the month of the year (e.g., 2nd September, 1945) is more natural.

Regards,
Simon Coulter.
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