Jay Pipes wrote:
All:
As you may know, Drizzle does not support timezones. All
datetimes/timestamps are stored and operated upon using UTC.
Due to this, it looks like the NOW() function and some of its brother
and sister synonym functions will overlap the functionality of the
UTC_TIMESTAMP() function.
According to the manual, the NOW() function:
"Returns the current date and time as a value in 'YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS'
or YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.uuuuuu format, depending on whether the function is
used in a string or numeric context. The value is expressed in the
current time zone."
According to the manual, the following functions are all synonyms for
the NOW() function:
CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
CURRENT_TIMESTAMP()
LOCALTIME
LOCALTIME()
LOCALTIMESTAMP
LOCALTIMESTAMP()
However, due to Drizzle only supporting UTC, the following functions
will be identical to NOW() as well:
UTC_TIMESTAMP()
UNIX_TIMESTAMP() (called with no args)
Questions for everyone to discuss/vote on:
OK, seriously, do we need all these synonyms?! Can we standardize on
one or two that best represent the result and purpose of the function?
Personally, I think that UTC_TIMESTAMP() is the most descriptive, but
can see CURRENT_TIMESTAMP() as OK too. Keeping NOW() may be good for
people moving from MySQL to Drizzle, however, it may introduce issues
where the user assumes the behaviour of NOW() to use timezones.
These are the standard types:
CURRENT_DATE
CURRENT_TIME
CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
LOCALTIME
LOCALTIMESTAMP
Obviously, there is no reason to keep neither LOCALTIME nor
LOCALTIMESTAMP due to lack of local time types. UTC_TIMESTAMP should be
deleted - UTC is implicit in CURRENT_TIMESTAMP. NOW can be kept as a
synonym, I guess.
Note also that the standard defines e.g CURRENT_TIME(precision), where
precision defines the split-second precision of the value. Even though
Drizzle does not currently support arbitrary time precision, I'd suggest
you delete the CURRENT_TIME() syntax because it is redundant and it
might be confused with the precision specification syntax.
Thanks,
Roy
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