Lee Crain wrote:
Several years ago when I worked for a Fortune 70 company, we had a server
whose source code and database were complicated by timestamps. I say
complicated because there were different timestamp datatypes used for
different fields (inherited from the data sources), the data could be
stored in different formats, timestamp precision varied, and it was a
problem to translate back and forth between the different representations
and compare them. All of this added up to the occasional exercise of some
obscure bugs in the server.
I successfully undertook a project to fix this for all time. My solution
was very simple: all timestamps were represented as strings in the
following format:
"YYYYMMDD:HHmmSS.nnnnnn"
This format, no what the original data source or format, became the
standard format for timestamps on this particular server. Precision was to
the microsecond for all data, even if represented by zeroes.
This had several virtues:
When debugging software, all timestamps were readable when using Debug.
Instead of looking at some binary number, the timestamp was easily human
readable.
When using administrative tools to access the database, it was easy to
examine, modify, and compare timestamps, since they were all human
readable and in exactly the same format.
When comparing timestamps in the software to determine the most current,
a simple string comparison always produced the correct result.
The only feature that might have been needed (but wasn't on this
particular server) was the ability to add or subtract time intervals from
the timestamp.
You may wish to consider a similar approach to managing your date and time
information.
Lee Crain
That approach makes date processing clumsy. Distributing dates across
time zones and into different calendars is difficult. Date arithmetic
is awkward.
When you use dates and times based on the magic astronomical epoch
everything is simplified. Time zones and calendars are handled fairly
transparently.
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