How to create “Upcoming birthdays” module in Rails?

Question

I have a table \"users\" with a column \"date_of_birth\" (DATE format with day, month, year). In frontend I need to list 5 upcoming birthdays.

Spent ages trying to w

Answer 1

If you're on Oracle, you can do it without creating a new column. IMO it's a smell to create a column that contains data you already have.

The SQL's a bit ugly - I'm sure there's a more elegant way to do it. Generally in these cases I'd ask my DBA friends for advice.

User.find(:all,
  :conditions => 
    "TO_NUMBER(TO_CHAR(dob, 'MMDD')) >= TO_NUMBER(TO_CHAR(SYSDATE, 'MMDD'))",
  :order => "TO_NUMBER(TO_CHAR(dob, 'MMDD'))",
  :limit => 5)

Some people think a duplicate column is faster, but if you have enough user data that speed's an issue, you should benchmark the duplicate column against a table without it that has a functional index on TO_NUMBER(TO_CHAR(dob, 'MMDD')).