On Aug 27, 2008, at 1:22 PM, Giuseppe Maxia wrote:
Timestamps with time zone information are quite common (blog XML feeds, web server logs), and the user must have a way of inserting that information without need to write an application. Think about this: I have some data to insert, and an application that does not know about TZ.
If your application is dealing with times and dates with timezones but is not aware of them, you will hurt yourself and your users. Some of the failures will be obvious and painful. Others will be too subtle to notice until it's far too late.
I'd say that adding (non compulsory) TZ information to the datetime field is going to be good for users.
There's a difference between handling timezone input and output and making the mistake of trying to _store_ timezone information on an individual timestamp.
If you want to support timezones at the database layer, you have a lot of work ahead of you. You're going to need to keep a set of Olson- derived timezone definitions up to date. They change frequently but irregularly. Based on legislative and regulatory activity. Of a wide variety of different governments. Sometimes on short notice. On top of that, some dates and times with timezones are ambiguous. Especially around daylight savings transitions.
Given Drizzle's stated goal of providing really great support for plugins, I would _love_ to see a drizzle timezone plugin which adds functions which make it easy to extract timezone information from a timestamp and to cast from a timestamp with a timezone to something in UTC and back again. It might even be neat to see an optional pluggable type that is timezone aware, but it strikes me as a dangerous feature to make mandatory or a default.
As an application developer, I am strongly in favor of Drizzle speaking only UTC natively.
-j _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~drizzle-discuss Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~drizzle-discuss More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
