Re: [INTERFACES] Re: M$-Access'97 and TIMESTAMPs

Byron Nikolaidis wrote:
>
> Krasnow, Greg wrote:
>
> > I haven't looked at DATETIME stuff, but does Postgres not have something
> > similar to Oracle's SYSDATE? In Oracle you can set an Oracle DATE column to
> > have a default of SYSDATE. This way Oracle can fill in the column at the
> > time an insert is done.
> >
>
> Yes, you are right, and I noticed Jose' earlier mail about this on the 'sql'
> list.
>
> If you do:
>
> create table x (a timestamp DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, b varchar);
>
> It works AND it puts in the current time at INSERT of the new row. (I noticed
> if you use CURRENT_TIME instead, you get the time you created the table at, for
> every row, which is not very useful.)
>
> The only problem is that it doesn't change the value on an UPDATE!
>
> Any thoughts?

Why not use the system column tmin for this purpose?

hannu=> create table test(i int);
CREATE
hannu=> insert into test values(5);
INSERT 17454 1
hannu=> select tmin,tmax,i from test;
tmin |tmax |i
-----------------------------+-------+-
Thu Jun 11 11:12:17 1998 EEST|current|5
(1 row)

hannu=> update test set i=2;
UPDATE 1
hannu=> select tmin,tmax,i from test;
tmin |tmax |i
-----------------------------+-------+-
Thu Jun 11 11:13:00 1998 EEST|current|2
(1 row)

------
Hannu