Way to store various shop opening times in a database

Question

I want to store opening times for different shops in a database. At the moment I am working with the simplest solution:

CREATE TABLE opening_times(
 shop_id          


        

Answer 1

Normalise your data

store it as

shop_ID, Weekday, Start_hour, end_hour

weekday can have values between 1 and 7, as an output of

SELECT DAYOFWEEK('2007-02-03')

start hour and end hour can be stored in time http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/time.html

with this you would have everything covered

To find hours on a date for a shop you would do

select start_hour, end_hour from table where weekday=dayofweek(curdate()) and shop_id=1

Need 2 time intervals for a day for a shop? no problem,

`shop ID, weekday, start_hour, end_hour`
1;         1;       08:00:00 ; 09:00:00
1;         1;       10:00:00 ; 11:00:00

For exceptions, you can add an exceptions table with the date and the shop. You can query that, and if it's null(no exception), return opening hours. Alternatively you can store every date for every shop, but that would bloat your data.