Comparison Question

[IP076]

First time poster, gotta like the site though, very helpful, however, I've got a situation that I can't seem to figure out.

I need to be able to compare availability of people to find common availability.

I'd like to have Person A, who is available from say 10:00 to 14:00, and be able to search my database for people with matching availability. Has anyone done anything similar to this?

I'll admit, I don't even really know where to start. I'm trying to decide if it would be better to store availability in blocks, like having Person, Start, Finish fields in a table or if it would be better to store the times they are available, like having just Person, and Time fields in a table.

I was thinking if I can find a way to compare arrays and return similar values, I might be able to work, if you have a function that can do that, that'd be great! Thanks in advance for the help!

ps, I'm using PHP5 and Mysql 4.1.

[devinemke]

i suggest you store the people and the availabilities in two separate tables (with a foreign key in the availabilities tables that relates to the primary key in the people table). the availabilities tables would have two DATETIME fileds called "start" and "end" and you can simply query the table for all of the availabilities for a given person (and then compare that to other people).

[IP076]

Thanks for the info, I had planned on keeping them in seperate tables, but I guess I didnt make it clear....

I think I'll probably end up storing start and end times and building queries using that data.

Thanks for the suggestions!