On 2000-01-17, Thomas Lockhart mentioned:
> > The official SQL data types are "timestamp" and
> > "interval", right? Everything else will eventually be an alias or
> > phased out or whatever?
>
> No (at least I haven't proposed that). abstime stays as a 4-byte
> internal system time type. timestamp and interval become full-featured
> date/time types, stealing all of the datetime and timespan code, and
> the latter two become synonyms for timestamp and interval.
Okay, so we have "timestamp" and "interval" as offical types, a few
"datetime" sort of things as aliases for backwards compatibility, and
"abstime" as a more or less internal type with less precision and storage
requirements. Sounds clear to me. This also puts the original TODO item
into a much clearer light.
> > I've been itching to change the pg_shadow.valuntil column to timestamp
> > anyway, I suppose that would be a step in the right direction, or not?
>
> At the moment, there are *no* 8-byte date/time types in the system
> tables. This would be the first instance of that, and I'm not sure we
> should introduce it in just one place.
>
> Has abstime been a problem here?
No. I just thought this could be done, but in view of your explanation I
am now wiser ...
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Peter Eisentraut Sernanders väg 10:115
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