> So I discovered today that pgdb follows in the traditional style of
> carrying timestamp and most other time fields through to the user as
> text strings, so I either need to have all my queries do some gymnastics
> to have the server format my time information in a way that is printable
> or can be handled by my client code or whatever.
Right. Though the available styles *should* cover common usage, and
ISO-8601 is not a bad way to go imho.
> Is there a better way? I was thinking that if there was a way to set a
> datestyle that would just emit the seconds since the Unix epoch, I could
> kick them into the python time module's functions for easier formatting,
> and it would give all clients a more standardized way to deal with time
> by letting them get the 'raw' values and handle them locally.
Hmm. If the Python module has any date/time input routines, it *should*
be easy to ingest ISO-formatted dates. No? How about one of the other
available styles? If nothing else, you could go through to_char() to
format the date exactly as Python needs to see it (or directly for
display on your client apps). date_part('epoch'...) could get you Unix
system time, but that would last on my list...
- Thomas
