[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> 
> As I understand it, the mysql TIMESTAMP type represents the time in your
> local timezone (the one your computer is using).
> 
> This makes it problematic to use in timezones that have a summer/daylight
> savings time.  All of the date arithmetic functions will yield inaccurate
> results if one of the dates is in summer time and the other is in standard
> time.
> 
> For these reasons, I resort to using an INT field that stores "Unix" time
> (seconds since the start of the Unix epoch, 00:00:00 UTC, January 1, 1970).
> This makes the data independent of the database's time zone. I still use the
> TIMESTAMP data type as a convenient way to keep tabs on when a row was modified,
> if doing date arithmetic on the column is a concern.

I find myself doing this with a lot of databases as well, simply because
it's more useful in Perl-land to have an epoch time value. It might be
worthwile to have some way of retreiving a timestamp as an epoch value in
addition to other fifty ways you can currently retrieve it. (If there
already is a way, I'd be thrilled to hear about it.)

-- 
John Klein, Database Applications Developer |  Omnia Mutantur,
Systems Group - Harvard Law School          |  Nihil Interit

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