Re: date_trunc() in a specific time zone - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Vik Fearing
Subject Re: date_trunc() in a specific time zone
Date
Msg-id 8e02c671-5646-e920-564a-72adcd5ab54b@2ndquadrant.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: date_trunc() in a specific time zone  (Steve Crawford <scrawford@pinpointresearch.com>)
Responses Re: date_trunc() in a specific time zone  (Paul A Jungwirth <pj@illuminatedcomputing.com>)
List pgsql-hackers
On 29/10/2018 17:12, Steve Crawford wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 8:44 AM Vik Fearing <vik.fearing@2ndquadrant.com
> <mailto:vik.fearing@2ndquadrant.com>> wrote:
> 
>     On 29/10/2018 16:26, Andreas Karlsson wrote:
>     > On 10/29/2018 04:18 PM, Vik Fearing wrote:
>     >> A use case that I see quite a lot of is needing to do reports and
>     other
>     >> calculations on data per day/hour/etc but in the user's time
>     zone.  The
>     >> way to do that is fairly trivial, but it's not obvious what it
>     does so
>     >> reading queries becomes just a little bit more difficult.
>     >
>     > Hm, I am not sure if I see any major win from writing
>     >
>     > date_trunc('day', timestamptz '2001-02-16 20:38:40+00',
>     'Australia/Sydney')
>     >
>     > instead of
>     >
>     > date_trunc('day', timestamptz '2001-02-16 20:38:40+00' AT TIME ZONE
>     > 'Australia/Sydney')
> 
>     Because I don't want '2001-02-16 00:00:00' (where?), I want the precise
>     moment in time that that represents ('2001-02-16 13:00:00+00') so I can
>     pull the correct rows out of my big table.
> 
>     This isn't for display purposes.
> 
> 
> I'm a bit confused as to the use case. Wouldn't someone who wants
> locally-based time-period ranges also want output displayed in the
> corresponding zone both of which are already well handled in one place
> by "set timezone..."?

You're confusing projection and selection.  I don't necessarily want to
display any dates, I could be grouping and aggregating.  Setting the
session timezone is also not adequate because I could be handling data
from different time zones.
-- 
Vik Fearing                                          +33 6 46 75 15 36
http://2ndQuadrant.fr     PostgreSQL : Expertise, Formation et Support


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