Re: now() gives the time of the last commit, not the time it

On Wed, 16 Oct 2002, Talja Ari wrote:

> Postgres version: 7.2.1
> Platform: Server on Linux, (java-)client on HP-UX.11 and SunOS 5.8
> JDBC drivers: For PostgreSQL 7.2, JDK 1.3
> JDK version: 1.3.1
> Autocommit off for each connection
> Special server flags: -i to allow the connections from different host
>
> The program is a java server, which updates a row in the database at regular
> intervals. The update time is taken from postgres function now() but the
> update time is the time when the connection was created/last transaction
> ended. In Oracle the time which is created by 'sysdate' is the time when the
> update statement is executed (or the time when the statement is actually
> committed. I'm not sure about that because the execution and commit are
> called practically at the same time). This causes a delay to the time and
> the size of the delay can be almost anything depending on the time how long
> the connection has been without any use. The connections are kept in a
> connection pool for later use so I cannot trust that the connection is
> created or the transaction has ended recently enough. Currently I'm calling
> commit before I execute the update statement.

This is the currently intended behavior of now(), if you want the moment
the call is made, you can use timeofday() I believe.