Is it possible to search for dates as strings in a database-agnostic way?

Question

I have a Ruby on Rails application with a PostgreSQL database; several tables have created_at and updated_at timestamp attributes. When displayed, those dates are formatted in the user's locale; for example, the timestamp 2009-10-15 16:30:00.435 becomes the string 15.10.2009 - 16:30 (the date format for this example being dd.mm.yyyy - hh.mm).

The requirement is that the user must be able to search for records by date, as if they were strings formatted in the current locale. For example, searching for 15.10.2009 would return records with dates on October 15th 2009, searching for 15.10 would return records with dates on October 15th of any year, searching for 15 would return all dates that match 15 (be it day, month or year). Since the user can use any part of a date as a search term, it cannot be converted to a date/timestamp for comparison.

One (slow) way would be to retrieve all records, format the dates, and perform the search on that. This could be sped up by retrieving only the id and dates at first, performing the search, and then fetching the data for the matching records; but it could still be slow for large numbers of rows.

Another (not database-agnostic) way would be to cast/format the dates to the right format in the database with PostgreSQL functions or operators, and have the database do the matching (with the PostgreSQL regexp operators or whatnot).

Is there a way to do this efficiently (without fetching all rows) in a database-agnostic way? Or do you think I am going in the wrong direction and should approach the problem differently?

Answer 1

Building on the answer from Carlos, this should allow all of your searches without full table scans if you have indexes on all the date and date part fields. Function-based indexes would be better for the date part columns, but I'm not using them since this should not be database-specific.

CREATE TABLE mytable (
    col1 varchar(10),
    -- ...
    inserted_at timestamp,
    updated_at timestamp);

INSERT INTO mytable
VALUES
    ('a', '2010-01-02', NULL),
    ('b', '2009-01-02', '2010-01-03'),
    ('c', '2009-11-12', NULL),
    ('d', '2008-03-31', '2009-04-18');

ALTER TABLE mytable
    ADD inserted_at_month integer,
    ADD inserted_at_day integer,
    ADD updated_at_month integer,
    ADD updated_at_day integer;

-- you will have to find your own way to maintain these values...
UPDATE mytable
SET
    inserted_at_month = date_part('month', inserted_at),
    inserted_at_day = date_part('day', inserted_at),
    updated_at_month = date_part('month', updated_at),
    updated_at_day = date_part('day', updated_at);

If the user enters only Year use WHERE Date BETWEEN 'YYYY-01-01' AND 'YYYY-12-31'

SELECT *
FROM mytable
WHERE
    inserted_at BETWEEN '2010-01-01' AND '2010-12-31'
    OR updated_at BETWEEN '2010-01-01' AND '2010-12-31';

If the user enters Year and Month use WHERE Date BETWEEN 'YYYY-MM-01' AND 'YYYY-MM-31' (may need adjustment for 30/29/28)

SELECT *
FROM mytable
WHERE
    inserted_at BETWEEN '2010-01-01' AND '2010-01-31'
    OR updated_at BETWEEN '2010-01-01' AND '2010-01-31';

If the user enters the three values use SELECT .... WHERE Date = 'YYYY-MM-DD'

SELECT *
FROM mytable
WHERE
    inserted_at = '2009-11-12'
    OR updated_at = '2009-11-12';

If the user enters Month and Day

SELECT *
FROM mytable
WHERE
    inserted_at_month = 3
    OR inserted_at_day = 31
    OR updated_at_month = 3
    OR updated_at_day = 31;

If the user enters Month or Day (you could optimize to not check values > 12 as a month)

SELECT *
FROM mytable
WHERE
    inserted_at_month = 12
    OR inserted_at_day = 12
    OR updated_at_month = 12
    OR updated_at_day = 12;