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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AVRO-739?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=13760779#comment-13760779
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Scott Carey commented on AVRO-739:
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{quote}
These seem like two different external representations of the same thing. A
time plus a timezone can be losslessly converted to a UTC time. You do lose the
original timezone, but dates and times are usually displayed in the timezone of
the displayer, not where the time was originally noted.
{quote}
I completely agree for use cases where the time is being displayed to a user,
but there are use cases where the loss of the original time zone is not
acceptable. One could log another field with the timezone identifier for
these. The use case for a UTC timestamp is more broadly applicable. I do
not think we need to implement the one that also persists timezone now, but I
do think we need to make sure that if we did implement such a thing in the
future, that the names for these two things would be consistent. If we name
this "Datetime" we are implying it has relation to dates, which implies
relationship to timezones.
With respect to the SQL variants, I see only two that represent a single point
in time. Three are either dates or times and not the combination (e.g. "January
7, 2100", representing a time with granularity of one day, or "5:01" -- a time
of day, respectively).
The two SQL equivalents are TIMESTAMP and TIMESTAMP WITH TIMEZONE. This
proposal covers TIMESTAMP, roughly. I am suggesting we reserve space for a
future TIMESTAMP WITH TIMEZONE. We could adopt the names for consistency.
"timestamp"
and
"timestamptz"
There is also the question of serialization in JSON form. A long in binary
form makes sense, but in JSON, an ISO8601 string might be more useful.
> Add Date/Time data types
> ------------------------
>
> Key: AVRO-739
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AVRO-739
> Project: Avro
> Issue Type: New Feature
> Components: spec
> Reporter: Jeff Hammerbacher
> Attachments: AVRO-739.patch
>
>
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