Re: timestamp with time zone ~> GMT

On 2025-Feb-03, Robert Treat wrote:

> This does seem to come up often enough that it probably is worth being
> a bit more explicit about how this works; attached patch attempts
> that.

LGTM.

> Note, I dropped the bit about GMT; that change was made ~40 years ago,
> and I suspect it is close to noise for many people these days, though
> it could be added back if folks feel strongly about it.

I don't feel strongly about it, but another option might be to add a
<footnote> so that it is still there but less intrusive. Grepping for
GMT in the postgres repo there are still over 1400 matches of all kinds.

> As Tom notes above, what to store is debatable, and generally seems to
> conflate storage and display desires together, which makes it hard to
> imagine a generic enough implementation to put into core, but there
> are some attempts to solve this problem floating around in extension
> land. See https://github.com/mweber26/timestampandtz/blob/master/README.md
> as one such attempt.

Another simple option is to store a timezone name in a separate column,
which you can then use in the AT TIME ZONE clause. This is of course
more wasteful than storing a 2-byte zone identifier as the
timestampandtz extension does.

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