Year 2000 Compliance

Never a Problem for Trifox

Trifox's VORTEX has always been "Year 2000 Compliant," supporting the Julian date system that is available in most commercial relational database management systems. A Julian date is the number of days since January 1, 4712 BC. Valid values for the datatype date range from January 1, 4712 BC to December 31, 4712 AD.

VORTEX supports the date datatype, including century, year, month, day, hour, minute, and second, in all formats used by the variety of development tools, including our own DesignVision.

Why the Panic?

The year 2000 has been touted as an impending disaster for all computers, computer-related businesses, and the modern world. What's the real story?

For years, both as a space-saving and efficiency measure, software applications used a two-digit number to represent the year. The default, or implied, century was '19.' This approach worked for many years, but with the upcoming change in the millennium, these applications will need to change.

While concern is widespread, the only applications that really are affected are those that run against flat-file databases, such as ISAM, which were developed when the space to store two bytes made a difference to cost and efficiency, and those applications written by developers who assumed that two digits satisfied date requirements.

What is Compliance?

Typically, Year 2000 Compliance means:

»	Information systems designed to be used prior to, during, and after the calendar year 2000 will operate without error relating to date data.
»	Software and applications will not abnormally end or provide invalid or incorrect results as a result of date data, especially between centuries.
»	No value for current date will cause interruptions in desired operations.
»	All manipulations of time-related data (dates, durations, days of week, etc.) will produce the desired results for all valid date values with the applications.
»	Date elements in interfaces and data storage will permit specifying century to eliminate date ambiguity.
»	For any date element represented without century, the correct century is unambiguous for all manipulations involving that element.

© 1985-2020 Updated 26 Sep 2005.