Hi, There is an ongoing effort amongst the SQL engines of the Hadoop stack to support different timestamp semantics. This development has some implications for the low-level timestamp types as well. The new timestamp types added to the different SQL engines will rely on the decisions of the lower level components about which timestamps semantics they support and how.
I have created a document to summarize what this means for on-disk storage formats in general and I am sending it out to multiple dev mailing lists to let you know about this new requirement and to initiate a discussion in affected open source components. The document can be read here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E-7miCh4qK6Mg54b-Dh5VOyhGX8V4xdMXKIHJL36a9U/edit Please let me know your thoughts. Thanks, Zoltan