I'm working on an app that is partly an employee time clock. It's not too complex but I want to make sure I head in the right direction the first time. I currently have this table structure:
id - int
employee_id - int (fk)
timestamp - mysql timestamp
event_code - int (1 for clock in, 0 for clock out)
I've got everything working where if their last event was a "clock in" they only see the "clock out" button and visa-versa.
My problem is that we will need to run a report that shows how many hours an employee has worked in a month and also total hours during the current fiscal year (Since June 1 of the current year).
Seems like I could store clock in and outs in the same record and maybe even calculate minutes worked between the two events and store that in a column called "worked". Then I would just need to get the sum of all that column for that employee to know how much time total.
Should I keep the structure I have, move to all on one row per pair of clock in and out events, or is there a better way that I'm totally missing?
I know human error is also a big issue for time clocks since people often forget to clock in or out and I'm not sure which structure can handle that easier.
Is MySQL Timestamp a good option or should I use UNIX Timestamp?
Thanks for any advise/direction.
Rich
I would go with two tables:
One table should be simple log of what events occurred, like your existing design.
The second table contains the calculated working hours. There are columns for the logged in and logged out times and perhaps also a third column with the time difference between them precalculated.
The point is that the calculation of how many hours an employee has worked is complicated, as you mention. Employees may complain that they worked longer hours than your program reports. In this case you want to have access to the original log of all events with no information loss so that you can see and debug exactly what happened. But this raw format is slow and difficult to work with in SQL so for reporting purposes you also want the second table so that you can quickly generate reports with weekly, monthly or yearly sums.
Is MySQL Timestamp a good option or should I use UNIX Timestamp?
Timestamp is good because there are lots of MySQL functions that work well with timestamp. You might also want to consider using datetime which is very similar to timestamp.
Related
Should I use field 'datetime' or 'timestamp'?
Related
I need to know how many times a page is viewed in a specific timeframe, say the last 30 days. In the database there is a PageViewCount field so every time the page is viewed, the PageViewCount increases, but there is no timestamp in the database of when this occurs.
I know there has to be a simple solution to this, but I am having a real hard time wrapping my brain around it.
As it is stated, it is impossible to query for such a value. Consider the following equivalent example: I have some coins, for a total of $3.50 and I don't track the movements of the coins. How much money did I had yesterday?
You should have a daily procedure that stores the current PageViewCount with the current date in another table and then simply query that table.
I am stuck with a problem. In an app's db, I am having a schedule table which will store user provided schedules. E.g
Daily
Every Week
Twice a Week
Every 3rd (or any user chosen) day of week
Every Month
Twice a month
Every x day of month
Every x month of year
And so on. These schedules will then provide reference point to schedule different tasks or identify their repeat-ance.
I am not able to think of a proper database structure for it. The best I can get is to have a table with following columns:
Day
Week
Month
Year
type
Then store the specified schedule in the related column and provide the type.
e.g Every week can go like 1 in week column and 1 (designated value for repeating whole) or something like that.
The problem with this approach is that this table is gonna be used very frequently and the data retrieved will not be straightforward. It will need calculation to know the schedule type and hence will require complex db queries to get each type of schedule.
I am implementing it in Laravel app if that can provide any other methodology. It's a SAAS app with huge amount of data related to the schedule table.
Any help will be very much appreciated. Thanks
I suggest you are approaching the problem backwards.
Devise several rules. Code the rules in your app, not in SQL. When inserting an event, pre-fill a calendar through the next 12 months with all occurrences of the event. Every month, go through all events and extend the "pre-fill" through another month (13 months hence).
Now the SELECTs are simple and fast.
SELECT ... WHERE date = '...'
has all the events for that day (assuming it is within 12 months).
The complexity is on inserting. But presumably you insert less often than you select.
The table with the event definitions would be only as complex as needed for your app to figure out what to do. Perhaps
start_date DATE,
frequency ENUM('day', 'week', 'month', ...)
multiplier TINYINT, -- this lets you say "every second week"
offset TINYINT, -- to get "15th of every month"
Twice a week would be two entries.
Better yet, there are several packages (in Perl, shell, etc) that provide a very rich language for expressing event-date-patterns. Furthermore, you may be able to simply 'call' it to do all the work for you!
I am writing a script which will counts the number of ticket as per as different conditions and store the count in a summary table. I am unable to understand how to structure my table since there will be more than 1 variables.
The script will run every week and with each execution a new week will be added. Once the new month starts and scripts execute, a new month will be added and once new year starts a new year will be added. So in a nutshell I have columns which are also variables. Not sure how to handle it and structure my db.
Have columns Date Service Count.
Like so.
Date Service Count
16 May 2016 Service1 35
Then when you go to display them in the report pivot them as you want. Probably better to make date an INT and either an auto number PK or composite PK of Date and Service.
Wrong approach. Do not splay an array across columns. Instead have rows for the data. This lets you trivially "add" another month.
For displaying, well that is an application problem, no a MySQL problem. Sure, you can write specialized queries to "pivot" the data from rows to columns, but it is messy.
I'm trying to help a taxi company. The problem is that they have a credit card machine that takes payments, and has its own database entries, and there is a completely separate database that has a list of entries such as pick up time, and drop off time.
I need to match the database of trip entries to the credit card purchases, and the only way to do this is by matching which vehicle is running the transaction, and looking for a time CLOSE TO the DROP OFF time and see if it's a match. It's not ideal.
So, I am trying to compare two times in yy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss format. They need to be plus or minus 5 minutes of each other. How do I do this in MYSQL?
I thought SubTime and Addtime would work, and it seemed to, but then I got wierd results.
SELECT * FROM completedtrans WHERE DrivID = 128 AND TransTime BETWEEN SUBTIME('2013-06-20 16:53:06', '0 00:05:00') AND ADDTIME('2013-06-20 16:53:06', '0 00:05:00')
Here's an example of one of my searches. Can anyone tell me what's wrong with it? It's supposed to search 5 minutes before and after that particular given time. I can't simply write the time, because the query is automatically generated through php code.
Hi I am developing a Taxreturn Program in Java language and is my first time I am developing a program with database. I have three Forms which means I need three tables in my database where I am going to store information of each form. My first Form is for customers the second is for bookings and the third is for tax records I have successful make the customer form work with the database but i got stuck in the booking form as i need the correct syntax.
in my booking table i need to store the date, time as Is logical I have to have only one booking time for each day how can i do that. I will appreciate any help thanks
It depends on the type of the field.
If field is Date, some implementations assume the time is 00:00:00 ... Many of them simply store the exact timestamp, but truncate and give you the value, as required.
Best way to do it is when inserting, manually specify the exact time yourself. This is the most cross-database way of doing things.