8.5. Date/Time Types
Postgres Pro supports the full set of SQL date and time types, shown in Table 8.9. The operations available on these data types are described in Section 9.9. Dates are counted according to the Gregorian calendar, even in years before that calendar was introduced (see Section B.6 for more information).
Table 8.9. Date/Time Types
Name | Storage Size | Description | Low Value | High Value | Resolution |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
timestamp [ ( | 8 bytes | both date and time (no time zone) | 4713 BC | 294276 AD | 1 microsecond |
timestamp [ ( | 8 bytes | both date and time, with time zone | 4713 BC | 294276 AD | 1 microsecond |
date | 4 bytes | date (no time of day) | 4713 BC | 5874897 AD | 1 day |
time [ ( | 8 bytes | time of day (no date) | 00:00:00 | 24:00:00 | 1 microsecond |
time [ ( | 12 bytes | time of day (no date), with time zone | 00:00:00+1559 | 24:00:00-1559 | 1 microsecond |
interval [ | 16 bytes | time interval | -178000000 years | 178000000 years | 1 microsecond |
Note
The SQL standard requires that writing just timestamp
be equivalent to timestamp without time zone
, and Postgres Pro honors that behavior. timestamptz
is accepted as an abbreviation for timestamp with time zone
; this is a Postgres Pro extension.
time
, timestamp
, and interval
accept an optional precision value p
which specifies the number of fractional digits retained in the seconds field. By default, there is no explicit bound on precision. The allowed range of p
is from 0 to 6.
The interval
type has an additional option, which is to restrict the set of stored fields by writing one of these phrases:
YEAR MONTH DAY HOUR MINUTE SECOND YEAR TO MONTH DAY TO HOUR DAY TO MINUTE DAY TO SECOND HOUR TO MINUTE HOUR TO SECOND MINUTE TO SECOND
Note that if both fields
and p
are specified, the fields
must include SECOND
, since the precision applies only to the seconds.
The type time with time zone
is defined by the SQL standard, but the definition exhibits properties which lead to questionable usefulness. In most cases, a combination of date
, time
, timestamp without time zone
, and timestamp with time zone
should provide a complete range of date/time functionality required by any application.
8.5.1. Date/Time Input
Date and time input is accepted in almost any reasonable format, including ISO 8601, SQL-compatible, traditional POSTGRES, and others. For some formats, ordering of day, month, and year in date input is ambiguous and there is support for specifying the expected ordering of these fields. Set the DateStyle parameter to MDY
to select month-day-year interpretation, DMY
to select day-month-year interpretation, or YMD
to select year-month-day interpretation.
Postgres Pro is more flexible in handling date/time input than the SQL standard requires. See Appendix B for the exact parsing rules of date/time input and for the recognized text fields including months, days of the week, and time zones.
Remember that any date or time literal input needs to be enclosed in single quotes, like text strings. Refer to Section 4.1.2.7 for more information. SQL requires the following syntax
type
[ (p
) ] 'value
'
where p
is an optional precision specification giving the number of fractional digits in the seconds field. Precision can be specified for time
, timestamp
, and interval
types, and can range from 0 to 6. If no precision is specified in a constant specification, it defaults to the precision of the literal value (but not more than 6 digits).
8.5.1.1. Dates
Table 8.10 shows some possible inputs for the date
type.
Table 8.10. Date Input
Example | Description |
---|---|
1999-01-08 | ISO 8601; January 8 in any mode (recommended format) |
January 8, 1999 | unambiguous in any datestyle input mode |
1/8/1999 | January 8 in MDY mode; August 1 in DMY mode |
1/18/1999 | January 18 in MDY mode; rejected in other modes |
01/02/03 | January 2, 2003 in MDY mode; February 1, 2003 in DMY mode; February 3, 2001 in YMD mode |
1999-Jan-08 | January 8 in any mode |
Jan-08-1999 | January 8 in any mode |
08-Jan-1999 | January 8 in any mode |
99-Jan-08 | January 8 in YMD mode, else error |
08-Jan-99 | January 8, except error in YMD mode |
Jan-08-99 | January 8, except error in YMD mode |
19990108 | ISO 8601; January 8, 1999 in any mode |
990108 | ISO 8601; January 8, 1999 in any mode |
1999.008 | year and day of year |
J2451187 | Julian date |
January 8, 99 BC | year 99 BC |
8.5.1.2. Times
The time-of-day types are time [ (
and p
) ] without time zonetime [ (
. p
) ] with time zonetime
alone is equivalent to time without time zone
.
Valid input for these types consists of a time of day followed by an optional time zone. (See Table 8.11 and Table 8.12.) If a time zone is specified in the input for time without time zone
, it is silently ignored. You can also specify a date but it will be ignored, except when you use a time zone name that involves a daylight-savings rule, such as America/New_York
. In this case specifying the date is required in order to determine whether standard or daylight-savings time applies. The appropriate time zone offset is recorded in the time with time zone
value and is output as stored; it is not adjusted to the active time zone.
Table 8.11. Time Input
Example | Description |
---|---|
04:05:06.789 | ISO 8601 |
04:05:06 | ISO 8601 |
04:05 | ISO 8601 |
040506 | ISO 8601 |
04:05 AM | same as 04:05; AM does not affect value |
04:05 PM | same as 16:05; input hour must be <= 12 |
04:05:06.789-8 | ISO 8601, with time zone as UTC offset |
04:05:06-08:00 | ISO 8601, with time zone as UTC offset |
04:05-08:00 | ISO 8601, with time zone as UTC offset |
040506-08 | ISO 8601, with time zone as UTC offset |
040506+0730 | ISO 8601, with fractional-hour time zone as UTC offset |
040506+07:30:00 | UTC offset specified to seconds (not allowed in ISO 8601) |
04:05:06 PST | time zone specified by abbreviation |
2003-04-12 04:05:06 America/New_York | time zone specified by full name |
Table 8.12. Time Zone Input
Example | Description |
---|---|
PST | Abbreviation (for Pacific Standard Time) |
America/New_York | Full time zone name |
PST8PDT | POSIX-style time zone specification |
-8:00:00 | UTC offset for PST |
-8:00 | UTC offset for PST (ISO 8601 extended format) |
-800 | UTC offset for PST (ISO 8601 basic format) |
-8 | UTC offset for PST (ISO 8601 basic format) |
zulu | Military abbreviation for UTC |
z | Short form of zulu (also in ISO 8601) |
Refer to Section 8.5.3 for more information on how to specify time zones.
8.5.1.3. Time Stamps
Valid input for the time stamp types consists of the concatenation of a date and a time, followed by an optional time zone, followed by an optional AD
or BC
. (Alternatively, AD
/BC
can appear before the time zone, but this is not the preferred ordering.) Thus:
1999-01-08 04:05:06
and:
1999-01-08 04:05:06 -8:00
are valid values, which follow the ISO 8601 standard. In addition, the common format:
January 8 04:05:06 1999 PST
is supported.
The SQL standard differentiates timestamp without time zone
and timestamp with time zone
literals by the presence of a “+” or “-” symbol and time zone offset after the time. Hence, according to the standard,
TIMESTAMP '2004-10-19 10:23:54'
is a timestamp without time zone
, while
TIMESTAMP '2004-10-19 10:23:54+02'
is a timestamp with time zone
. Postgres Pro never examines the content of a literal string before determining its type, and therefore will treat both of the above as timestamp without time zone
. To ensure that a literal is treated as timestamp with time zone
, give it the correct explicit type:
TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE '2004-10-19 10:23:54+02'
In a literal that has been determined to be timestamp without time zone
, Postgres Pro will silently ignore any time zone indication. That is, the resulting value is derived from the date/time fields in the input value, and is not adjusted for time zone.
For timestamp with time zone
, the internally stored value is always in UTC (Universal Coordinated Time, traditionally known as Greenwich Mean Time, GMT). An input value that has an explicit time zone specified is converted to UTC using the appropriate offset for that time zone. If no time zone is stated in the input string, then it is assumed to be in the time zone indicated by the system's TimeZone parameter, and is converted to UTC using the offset for the timezone
zone.
When a timestamp with time zone
value is output, it is always converted from UTC to the current timezone
zone, and displayed as local time in that zone. To see the time in another time zone, either change timezone
or use the AT TIME ZONE
construct (see Section 9.9.3).
Conversions between timestamp without time zone
and timestamp with time zone
normally assume that the timestamp without time zone
value should be taken or given as timezone
local time. A different time zone can be specified for the conversion using AT TIME ZONE
.
8.5.1.4. Special Values
Postgres Pro supports several special date/time input values for convenience, as shown in Table 8.13. The values infinity
and -infinity
are specially represented inside the system and will be displayed unchanged; but the others are simply notational shorthands that will be converted to ordinary date/time values when read. (In particular, now
and related strings are converted to a specific time value as soon as they are read.) All of these values need to be enclosed in single quotes when used as constants in SQL commands.
Table 8.13. Special Date/Time Inputs
Input String | Valid Types | Description |
---|---|---|
epoch | date , timestamp | 1970-01-01 00:00:00+00 (Unix system time zero) |
infinity | date , timestamp | later than all other time stamps |
-infinity | date , timestamp | earlier than all other time stamps |
now | date , time , timestamp | current transaction's start time |
today | date , timestamp | midnight (00:00 ) today |
tomorrow | date , timestamp | midnight (00:00 ) tomorrow |
yesterday | date , timestamp | midnight (00:00 ) yesterday |
allballs | time | 00:00:00.00 UTC |
The following SQL-compatible functions can also be used to obtain the current time value for the corresponding data type: CURRENT_DATE
, CURRENT_TIME
, CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
, LOCALTIME
, LOCALTIMESTAMP
. (See Section 9.9.4.) Note that these are SQL functions and are not recognized in data input strings.
Caution
While the input strings now
, today
, tomorrow
, and yesterday
are fine to use in interactive SQL commands, they can have surprising behavior when the command is saved to be executed later, for example in prepared statements, views, and function definitions. The string can be converted to a specific time value that continues to be used long after it becomes stale. Use one of the SQL functions instead in such contexts. For example, CURRENT_DATE + 1
is safer than 'tomorrow'::date
.
8.5.2. Date/Time Output
The output format of the date/time types can be set to one of the four styles ISO 8601, SQL (Ingres), traditional POSTGRES (Unix date format), or German. The default is the ISO format. (The SQL standard requires the use of the ISO 8601 format. The name of the “SQL” output format is a historical accident.) Table 8.14 shows examples of each output style. The output of the date
and time
types is generally only the date or time part in accordance with the given examples. However, the POSTGRES style outputs date-only values in ISO format.
Table 8.14. Date/Time Output Styles
Style Specification | Description | Example |
---|---|---|
ISO | ISO 8601, SQL standard | 1997-12-17 07:37:16-08 |
SQL | traditional style | 12/17/1997 07:37:16.00 PST |
Postgres | original style | Wed Dec 17 07:37:16 1997 PST |
German | regional style | 17.12.1997 07:37:16.00 PST |
Note
ISO 8601 specifies the use of uppercase letter T
to separate the date and time. Postgres Pro accepts that format on input, but on output it uses a space rather than T
, as shown above. This is for readability and for consistency with RFC 3339 as well as some other database systems.
In the SQL and POSTGRES styles, day appears before month if DMY field ordering has been specified, otherwise month appears before day. (See Section 8.5.1 for how this setting also affects interpretation of input values.) Table 8.15 shows examples.
Table 8.15. Date Order Conventions
datestyle Setting | Input Ordering | Example Output |
---|---|---|
SQL, DMY | day /month /year | 17/12/1997 15:37:16.00 CET |
SQL, MDY | month /day /year | 12/17/1997 07:37:16.00 PST |
Postgres, DMY | day /month /year | Wed 17 Dec 07:37:16 1997 PST |
In the ISO style, the time zone is always shown as a signed numeric offset from UTC, with positive sign used for zones east of Greenwich. The offset will be shown as hh
(hours only) if it is an integral number of hours, else as hh
:mm
if it is an integral number of minutes, else as hh
:mm
:ss
. (The third case is not possible with any modern time zone standard, but it can appear when working with timestamps that predate the adoption of standardized time zones.) In the other date styles, the time zone is shown as an alphabetic abbreviation if one is in common use in the current zone. Otherwise it appears as a signed numeric offset in ISO 8601 basic format (hh
or hhmm
).
The date/time style can be selected by the user using the SET datestyle
command, the DateStyle parameter in the postgresql.conf
configuration file, or the PGDATESTYLE
environment variable on the server or client.
The formatting function to_char
(see Section 9.8) is also available as a more flexible way to format date/time output.
8.5.3. Time Zones
Time zones, and time-zone conventions, are influenced by political decisions, not just earth geometry. Time zones around the world became somewhat standardized during the 1900s, but continue to be prone to arbitrary changes, particularly with respect to daylight-savings rules. Postgres Pro uses the widely-used IANA (Olson) time zone database for information about historical time zone rules. For times in the future, the assumption is that the latest known rules for a given time zone will continue to be observed indefinitely far into the future.
Postgres Pro endeavors to be compatible with the SQL standard definitions for typical usage. However, the SQL standard has an odd mix of date and time types and capabilities. Two obvious problems are:
Although the
date
type cannot have an associated time zone, thetime
type can. Time zones in the real world have little meaning unless associated with a date as well as a time, since the offset can vary through the year with daylight-saving time boundaries.The default time zone is specified as a constant numeric offset from UTC. It is therefore impossible to adapt to daylight-saving time when doing date/time arithmetic across DST boundaries.
To address these difficulties, we recommend using date/time types that contain both date and time when using time zones. We do not recommend using the type time with time zone
(though it is supported by Postgres Pro for legacy applications and for compliance with the SQL standard). Postgres Pro assumes your local time zone for any type containing only date or time.
All timezone-aware dates and times are stored internally in UTC. They are converted to local time in the zone specified by the TimeZone configuration parameter before being displayed to the client.
Postgres Pro allows you to specify time zones in three different forms:
A full time zone name, for example
America/New_York
. The recognized time zone names are listed in thepg_timezone_names
view (see Section 49.92). Postgres Pro uses the widely-used IANA time zone data for this purpose, so the same time zone names are also recognized by other software.A time zone abbreviation, for example
PST
. Such a specification merely defines a particular offset from UTC, in contrast to full time zone names which can imply a set of daylight savings transition rules as well. The recognized abbreviations are listed in thepg_timezone_abbrevs
view (see Section 49.91). You cannot set the configuration parameters TimeZone or log_timezone to a time zone abbreviation, but you can use abbreviations in date/time input values and with theAT TIME ZONE
operator.In addition to the timezone names and abbreviations, Postgres Pro will accept POSIX-style time zone specifications, as described in Section B.5. This option is not normally preferable to using a named time zone, but it may be necessary if no suitable IANA time zone entry is available.
In short, this is the difference between abbreviations and full names: abbreviations represent a specific offset from UTC, whereas many of the full names imply a local daylight-savings time rule, and so have two possible UTC offsets. As an example, 2014-06-04 12:00 America/New_York
represents noon local time in New York, which for this particular date was Eastern Daylight Time (UTC-4). So 2014-06-04 12:00 EDT
specifies that same time instant. But 2014-06-04 12:00 EST
specifies noon Eastern Standard Time (UTC-5), regardless of whether daylight savings was nominally in effect on that date.
To complicate matters, some jurisdictions have used the same timezone abbreviation to mean different UTC offsets at different times; for example, in Moscow MSK
has meant UTC+3 in some years and UTC+4 in others. Postgres Pro interprets such abbreviations according to whatever they meant (or had most recently meant) on the specified date; but, as with the EST
example above, this is not necessarily the same as local civil time on that date.
In all cases, timezone names and abbreviations are recognized case-insensitively. (This is a change from PostgreSQL versions prior to 8.2, which were case-sensitive in some contexts but not others.)
Neither timezone names nor abbreviations are hard-wired into the server; they are obtained from configuration files stored under .../share/timezone/
and .../share/timezonesets/
of the installation directory (see Section B.4).
The TimeZone configuration parameter can be set in the file postgresql.conf
, or in any of the other standard ways described in Chapter 18. There are also some special ways to set it:
The SQL command
SET TIME ZONE
sets the time zone for the session. This is an alternative spelling ofSET TIMEZONE TO
with a more SQL-spec-compatible syntax.The
PGTZ
environment variable is used by libpq clients to send aSET TIME ZONE
command to the server upon connection.
8.5.4. Interval Input
interval
values can be written using the following verbose syntax:
[@]quantity
unit
[quantity
unit
...] [direction
]
where quantity
is a number (possibly signed); unit
is microsecond
, millisecond
, second
, minute
, hour
, day
, week
, month
, year
, decade
, century
, millennium
, or abbreviations or plurals of these units; direction
can be ago
or empty. The at sign (@
) is optional noise. The amounts of the different units are implicitly added with appropriate sign accounting. ago
negates all the fields. This syntax is also used for interval output, if IntervalStyle is set to postgres_verbose
.
Quantities of days, hours, minutes, and seconds can be specified without explicit unit markings. For example, '1 12:59:10'
is read the same as '1 day 12 hours 59 min 10 sec'
. Also, a combination of years and months can be specified with a dash; for example '200-10'
is read the same as '200 years 10 months'
. (These shorter forms are in fact the only ones allowed by the SQL standard, and are used for output when IntervalStyle
is set to sql_standard
.)
Interval values can also be written as ISO 8601 time intervals, using either the “format with designators” of the standard's section 4.4.3.2 or the “alternative format” of section 4.4.3.3. The format with designators looks like this:
Pquantity
unit
[quantity
unit
...] [ T [quantity
unit
...]]
The string must start with a P
, and may include a T
that introduces the time-of-day units. The available unit abbreviations are given in Table 8.16. Units may be omitted, and may be specified in any order, but units smaller than a day must appear after T
. In particular, the meaning of M
depends on whether it is before or after T
.
Table 8.16. ISO 8601 Interval Unit Abbreviations
Abbreviation | Meaning |
---|---|
Y | Years |
M | Months (in the date part) |
W | Weeks |
D | Days |
H | Hours |
M | Minutes (in the time part) |
S | Seconds |
In the alternative format:
P [years
-months
-days
] [ Thours
:minutes
:seconds
]
the string must begin with P
, and a T
separates the date and time parts of the interval. The values are given as numbers similar to ISO 8601 dates.
When writing an interval constant with a fields
specification, or when assigning a string to an interval column that was defined with a fields
specification, the interpretation of unmarked quantities depends on the fields
. For example INTERVAL '1' YEAR
is read as 1 year, whereas INTERVAL '1'
means 1 second. Also, field values “to the right” of the least significant field allowed by the fields
specification are silently discarded. For example, writing INTERVAL '1 day 2:03:04' HOUR TO MINUTE
results in dropping the seconds field, but not the day field.
According to the SQL standard all fields of an interval value must have the same sign, so a leading negative sign applies to all fields; for example the negative sign in the interval literal '-1 2:03:04'
applies to both the days and hour/minute/second parts. Postgres Pro allows the fields to have different signs, and traditionally treats each field in the textual representation as independently signed, so that the hour/minute/second part is considered positive in this example. If IntervalStyle
is set to sql_standard
then a leading sign is considered to apply to all fields (but only if no additional signs appear). Otherwise the traditional Postgres Pro interpretation is used. To avoid ambiguity, it's recommended to attach an explicit sign to each field if any field is negative.
Internally, interval
values are stored as three integral fields: months, days, and microseconds. These fields are kept separate because the number of days in a month varies, while a day can have 23 or 25 hours if a daylight savings time transition is involved. An interval input string that uses other units is normalized into this format, and then reconstructed in a standardized way for output, for example:
SELECT '2 years 15 months 100 weeks 99 hours 123456789 milliseconds'::interval; interval --------------------------------------- 3 years 3 mons 700 days 133:17:36.789
Here weeks, which are understood as “7 days”, have been kept separate, while the smaller and larger time units were combined and normalized.
Input field values can have fractional parts, for example '1.5 weeks'
or '01:02:03.45'
. However, because interval
internally stores only integral fields, fractional values must be converted into smaller units. Fractional parts of units greater than months are truncated to be an integer number of months, e.g. '1.5 years'
becomes '1 year 6 mons'
. Fractional parts of weeks and days are computed to be an integer number of days and microseconds, assuming 30 days per month and 24 hours per day, e.g., '1.75 months'
becomes 1 mon 22 days 12:00:00
. Only seconds will ever be shown as fractional on output.
Table 8.17 shows some examples of valid interval
input.
Table 8.17. Interval Input
Example | Description |
---|---|
1-2 | SQL standard format: 1 year 2 months |
3 4:05:06 | SQL standard format: 3 days 4 hours 5 minutes 6 seconds |
1 year 2 months 3 days 4 hours 5 minutes 6 seconds | Traditional Postgres format: 1 year 2 months 3 days 4 hours 5 minutes 6 seconds |
P1Y2M3DT4H5M6S | ISO 8601 “format with designators”: same meaning as above |
P0001-02-03T04:05:06 | ISO 8601 “alternative format”: same meaning as above |
8.5.5. Interval Output
As previously explained, PostgreSQL stores interval
values as months, days, and microseconds. For output, the months field is converted to years and months by dividing by 12. The days field is shown as-is. The microseconds field is converted to hours, minutes, seconds, and fractional seconds. Thus months, minutes, and seconds will never be shown as exceeding the ranges 0–11, 0–59, and 0–59 respectively, while the displayed years, days, and hours fields can be quite large. (The justify_days
and justify_hours
functions can be used if it is desirable to transpose large days or hours values into the next higher field.)
The output format of the interval type can be set to one of the four styles sql_standard
, postgres
, postgres_verbose
, or iso_8601
, using the command SET intervalstyle
. The default is the postgres
format. Table 8.18 shows examples of each output style.
The sql_standard
style produces output that conforms to the SQL standard's specification for interval literal strings, if the interval value meets the standard's restrictions (either year-month only or day-time only, with no mixing of positive and negative components). Otherwise the output looks like a standard year-month literal string followed by a day-time literal string, with explicit signs added to disambiguate mixed-sign intervals.
The output of the postgres
style matches the output of PostgreSQL releases prior to 8.4 when the DateStyle parameter was set to ISO
.
The output of the postgres_verbose
style matches the output of PostgreSQL releases prior to 8.4 when the DateStyle
parameter was set to non-ISO
output.
The output of the iso_8601
style matches the “format with designators” described in section 4.4.3.2 of the ISO 8601 standard.
Table 8.18. Interval Output Style Examples
Style Specification | Year-Month Interval | Day-Time Interval | Mixed Interval |
---|---|---|---|
sql_standard | 1-2 | 3 4:05:06 | -1-2 +3 -4:05:06 |
postgres | 1 year 2 mons | 3 days 04:05:06 | -1 year -2 mons +3 days -04:05:06 |
postgres_verbose | @ 1 year 2 mons | @ 3 days 4 hours 5 mins 6 secs | @ 1 year 2 mons -3 days 4 hours 5 mins 6 secs ago |
iso_8601 | P1Y2M | P3DT4H5M6S | P-1Y-2M3DT-4H-5M-6S |