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Greg Rahn commented on ARROW-637: --------------------------------- Just to comment: most SQL implementations of {{TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE}} do not store timezone info (AFAIK, just Oracle's {{TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE}}), however, the data is normalized to UTC when stored. This means that a stored value of 0 would return 1970-01-01 00:00 (or in PostgreSQL year 2000 since their epoch is different than unix time) for a w/o timezone timestamp, but the same value of 0 would return 1970-01-01 00:00Z adjusted for local time zone settings if the type were "with time zone". For example: {noformat} grahn=# create table ts ( grahn(# ts_string varchar(50), grahn(# ts_timestamp timestamp without time zone, grahn(# ts_timestamptz timestamp with time zone grahn(# ); grahn=# insert into ts values ( grahn(# '2016-01-01 00:00:00+10'::varchar, grahn(# '2016-01-01 00:00:00+10'::timestamp, grahn(# '2016-01-01 00:00:00+10'::timestamptz grahn(# ); grahn=# show timezone; TimeZone ------------ US/Pacific grahn=# select * from ts; ts_string | ts_timestamp | ts_timestamptz ------------------------+---------------------+------------------------ 2016-01-01 00:00:00+10 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 | 2015-12-31 06:00:00-08 grahn=# set time zone 'Europe/Rome'; grahn=# show timezone; TimeZone ------------- Europe/Rome grahn=# select * from ts; ts_string | ts_timestamp | ts_timestamptz ------------------------+---------------------+------------------------ 2016-01-01 00:00:00+10 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 | 2015-12-31 15:00:00+01 {noformat} > [Format] Add time zone metadata to Timestamp type > ------------------------------------------------- > > Key: ARROW-637 > URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ARROW-637 > Project: Apache Arrow > Issue Type: New Feature > Components: Format > Reporter: Wes McKinney > Assignee: Wes McKinney > > As a metadata-only convenience, it would be useful to have an optional Olson > time zone name or absolute time offset (e.g. {{+07:30}}) in the {{Timestamp}} > flatbuffers type: > https://github.com/apache/arrow/blob/master/format/Message.fbs#L94 > Null or length-0 string would indicate that the data is time zone naive, and > shall not be considered to be localized. > https://github.com/apache/arrow/pull/388 -- This message was sent by Atlassian JIRA (v6.3.15#6346)