[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Jim Mercer) writes: > [ concern about speed of converting datetime values to/from text for > Postgres ] FWIW, I used to be really concerned about that too, because my applications do lots of storage and retrieval of datetimes. Then one day I did some profiling, and found that the datetime conversion code was down in the noise. Now I don't worry so much. It *would* be nice though if there were some reasonably cheap documented conversions between datetime and a standard Unix time_t displayed as a number. Not so much because of speed, as because there are all kinds of ways to get the conversion wrong on the client side --- messing up the timezone and not coping with all the Postgres datestyles are two easy ways to muff it. BTW, I believe Thomas is threatening to replace all the datetime-like types with what is currently called datetime (ie, a float8 measuring seconds with epoch 1/1/2000), so relying on the internal representation of abstime would be a bad idea... regards, tom lane