Re: storing TZ along timestamps - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Jim Nasby
Subject Re: storing TZ along timestamps
Date
Msg-id 3897E3E8-30BD-4639-8A4A-C9061D4E432E@nasby.net
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: storing TZ along timestamps  (Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu>)
List pgsql-hackers
On May 27, 2011, at 6:29 PM, Greg Stark wrote:
> Both of these two cases can be handled differently. The former by
> storing the raw text inputs and then storing the interpreted value as
> a derived column separetly, and the latter by storing the local time
> zone to use for display as an additional attribute along with the
> local address and other attributes of the calendar event.

Which means you're back to a very cumbersome method that involves another field. That's a tremendous amount of extra
code.

We run multiple businesses around the globe. Each business operates in it's own timezone, and 90% of the time we want
thingshandled in that timezone. The wheels fall off the wagon if we try and combine data from multiple locations into a
singledatabase; there's no reasonable way to say: give me the data in this field *at the timezone that was originally
entered*,except for not storing timezone data at all. If we don't store timezone data at all, then it's impossible to
determinean actual point in time that something happened at. 
--
Jim C. Nasby, Database Architect                   jim@nasby.net
512.569.9461 (cell)                         http://jim.nasby.net




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