Re: storing TZ along timestamps

On Jul 19, 2011, at 4:06 PM, Josh Berkus wrote:
>> I have my doubts about that, and I hope not. These details haven't been
>> discussed at all; I only started this thread to get community approval
>> on cataloguing the TZs.
>
> I am strongly in favor of having a *timezone* data type and some system
> whereby we can uniquely identify timezones in the Zic database. That
> would be tremendously useful for all sorts of things. I'm just
> asserting that those who want a composite timestamp+saved-time-zone data
> type have not thought about all of the complications involved.

Having to deal with timezone's completely separate from their timestamps is a huge PITA. That said, if we had a timezone datatype there's at least the possibility of using a composite type to deal with all of this. Or at least we can just create a custom datatype using existing tools... the only part of this that I see that actually requires closer core support is the timezone data itself.

So if the community is OK with adding a timezone datatype then we can focus on that and leave the timestamptztz data type as an add-on (at least assuming we don't run into any gotchas).

Alvaro, please speak up if there's any technical issues here that I've missed?
--
Jim C. Nasby, Database Architect jim(at)nasby(dot)net
512.569.9461 (cell) http://jim.nasby.net