Re: Handling Time - Mailing list pgsql-novice

From Tom Lane
Subject Re: Handling Time
Date
Msg-id 6462.1112368289@sss.pgh.pa.us
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Handling Time  (Aarni Ruuhimäki <aarni@kymi.com>)
List pgsql-novice
Aarni =?iso-8859-1?q?Ruuhim=E4ki?= <aarni@kymi.com> writes:
> So, the answer is that TIMESTAMP WITH TIMEZONE is good through 2037, and
> TIMESTAMP WITHOUT TIME ZONE is good through 10,000AD?

That was a reasonable answer at the time of the message you quote, but
PG 8.0 no longer relies on the OS for timezone support.  So now, to
repeat the example:

regression=# select '1999-09-27'::timestamp with time zone;
      timestamptz
------------------------
 1999-09-27 00:00:00-04
(1 row)

regression=# select '2999-09-27'::timestamp with time zone;
      timestamptz
------------------------
 2999-09-27 00:00:00-05
(1 row)

or for that matter

regression=# select '0099-09-27 BC'::timestamp with time zone;
        timestamptz
---------------------------
 0099-09-27 00:00:00-05 BC
(1 row)

The points I made before about the dubiousness of this calculation are
as valid as ever, but it's no longer a matter of not being able to do
it, it's just a matter of how much space you want to expend in the
timezone data files.  (The first and last dates shown above are outside
the range of the Americas/New_York timezone file that we supply, so PG
falls back to assuming local standard time.)

            regards, tom lane

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