Re: [HACKERS] TODO list

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 ...

-- 
Peter Eisentraut                  Sernanders väg 10:115
peter_e@gmx.net                   75262 Uppsala
http://yi.org/peter-e/            Sweden