On Mon, Jul 16, 2012 at 3:56 PM, Craig Ringer <ringerc@ringerc.id.au> wrote:
> On 07/16/2012 07:41 PM, Alban Hertroys wrote:
>>>>
>>>> BTW, that second value looks a whole lot like a poorly thought out
> Yup. The 'infinity' value doesn't play well with all database access APIs
> and languages, though.
It doesn't even play well with PostgreSQL's extract(). I reported it
some times ago but as of 9.1.4 it has not been fixed.
=# select extract(epoch from 'infinity'::timestamp);
date_part
-----------
0
This makes 'infinity' a problematic choice in any application
requiring a mapping between dates and reals, such as when using
intervals in gist indexes.
-- Daniele