Wasn't it you who said "I don't want to have to store as a CHAR or VARCHAR and have to write my own date handling routines in my app"? rowname.year and rowname.month sounds a lot like writing your own date handling routines.
And I am confused as to why you wouldn't use varchar or char to record, you know, inscribed writings. I mean if it says 1890-03-300 I assume you'd want the extra zero recorded, right?
