can strlst support multiple date values?

[tboyer]

I'd like to be able to search a LIST of dates within a single record using > and < and not sure if strlst will support it. Texis documentation seems to suggest this is not not a good idea but I want to ask because because strlist might give us better performance than adding a dates table and a relational query.

I.e. for three records, how can I efficiently find the records that have at least one date between 20130501 and 20140301:

ID Dates
1 20140101,20130501,20150801,20141211
2 20130101,20130506,21030801
3 19990201,20120101,20110101,20140501

Any thoughts? Even if it can be done, I wonder if the relational model might be faster because I could index for it. Thanks. Tom

[Kai]

I think you're out of luck at the moment. Relational operators with strlst just do a mem compare of the whole strlst and don't look at individual members, because it interprets those operators as looking at the whole set, and trichotomy etc. must hold for indexes. Var/multi-date and var/multi-integral have no relational (nor much insert) support yet.

You'll need to normalize the data (one id/date row per date per id).