Scheduling with Date Mod Part 2

So as the title suggests, this is the second part of a series on scheduling. In the first part we did some basic setup. Now we are ready to dig in. The goal here is to be able to model any recurring pattern no matter the cycle.

The linchpin in this solution is to define an anchor date and the cycle length for every schedule. Given those two pieces of information, we can calculate the day of cycle for any given date using date mod. So lets create a couple of tables.

Scheduling with Date Mod Part 1

One question that seems to come up a lot is how to model recurring schedules. That’s understandable, because schedules can get out of hand pretty quickly.

We need a template so that we can define a schedule and then some how project it out on a repeating basis. The single week schedules are pretty easy. We just record the day of week and for each schedule and day we look up that day of week to get the shift for that day.

Thinking in Sets of Sets

Over the summer, I built the Chronos temporal toolkit for Oracle. And for the last while I’ve been porting it to Postgres and working on the documentation.

The SQL standard defines several data types to model instances of times. But rarely does anything happen instantaneously. Often what we need to model is a period of time; for instance an airline flight, a hotel stay, a bus route, an employee’s shift, a doctor’s appointment, a leave request. And yet there is no standard defined to handle this. So instead we use some combination of start and end time, an anchor time and interval, or an anchor time and a number representing seconds, minutes or days.

Internal Data Representation

Have you ever wondered how your database represents the timestamp you just entered or how many bytes it takes to store a boolean or interval?

Oracle has a handy dump function that lets us peer into the internal representation of our data. Dump takes any type of input and returns a varchar2 describing the data type, length and the internal representation. Output might look like this:
‘Typ=96 Len=4: 84,101,99,104′