Data representation and storage - person's age

Question

I have a design issue I'm facing, I bring it up here so maybe I can get more ideas.

Currently in my project, I have a scenario where I need to represent the age of children.

The age can be from 0 to 15. from age 1 to 15 it's easy, I can store it as an integer, but the problem is if the age is between 0 and 1. Then I want to store it in months.

Storing the age as a java.util.Date won't work because I don't want to do comparison with the current date (I'm dealing with a really big database). regarding floating point, well you know that there are 12 months in one year, so then I need to to translate 0.5 to six months and 0.7 to I don't know...

I'm looking for a good way to store the age in one type. It can be Enum, etc. It should be small as possible. and it should be possible to persist the type in a database without any issues...

Answer 1

You could always store the age in an appropriate small unit (e.g. months), and convert it to years when you want.