On 08/29/2014 05:28 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
"k...@rice.edu" <k...@rice.edu> writes:
On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 03:33:56PM -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
So the standard requires storing of original timezone in the data type?
I was not aware of that.
I do not have a copy of the SQL 92 spec, but several references to the
spec mention that it defined the "time zone" as a format "SHH:MM" where
S represents the sign (+ or -), which seems to be what PostgreSQL uses.
Yeah, the spec envisions timezone as being a separate numeric field
(ie, a numeric GMT offset) within a timestamp with time zone. One of
the ways in which the spec's design is rather broken is that there's
no concept of real-world time zones with varying DST rules.
Anyway, I agree with the upthread comments that it'd have been better
if we'd used some other name for this datatype, and also that it's
at least ten years too late to revisit the choice :-(.
regards, tom lane
What about an alias for timestamptz? The current name is really confusing.
As for timestamp + time-zone (not just the offset) data type, it would
be very useful. For example, in Java they have 5 time types: LocalDate
for representing dates (date in Postgres), LocalTime for representing
times (time in Postgres), LocalDateTime to represent a date with a time
(timestamp in Postgres), Instant to represent a point on the time-line
(timestamptz in Postgres) and ZonedDateTime that models a point on the
time-line with a time-zone. Having a type for a time-zone itself would
be useful as well.
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