I am working on a project that needs calendar entries to create reminders for the users. I am storing the id, title, description, date, and time of each entry in a relational database.
Does it mess up data normalization by storing the start Date & Time together and end Date & time together or would it be best to separate them as so: startDate, endDate, startTime, endTime? As the first option would be more efficient in retrieving the events from the database to load on the front end.
My choice would always be to store date and time together in a DATETIME
column. Makes it far easier to search time ranges.
There's one possible exception: calendar entries that repeat at the same time. But solving that general problem is notoriously hard and beyond the scope of a Stack Overflow answer.