How to store dates with different levels of precision in postgres?

Question

I am storing data on journal papers from PubMed in Postgres, and I want to store the publication date of the paper. However, sometimes the date is just a year (see the PubDate field), sometimes it is a month and a year, and sometimes it is a day, month and year.

What's a sensible way to store this data in my database?

If I use a Postgres date field, I obviously need to specify day and month as well, but I'll need to invent them in some cases, and I don't like the idea of losing the information about the date's precision.

For my purposes I think I will only need the year, but I don't know that to be true for all possible future purposes.

Perhaps I should just have text fields for day, month and year, and then I can always convert them to a date field in the future if I need them?

Answer 1

I would store it as date and store the precision as well.

For example:

CREATE TYPE date_prec AS ENUM ('day', 'month', 'year');

CREATE TABLE pub (
   pub_id integer PRIMARY KEY,
   pub_date date NOT NULL,
   pub_date_prec date_prec NOT NULL
);

Then you can query the table like this:

SELECT pub_id, date_trunc(pub_date_prec::text, pub_date)::date FROM pub;

to ignore any “random” day and month values in pub_date.