Re: Date calculation produces wrong output with 7.02

> Date calculation produces wrong output with 7.02
> cascade=> select date(CURRENT_DATE + ('30 days'::reltime));
> date
> ----------
> 9097-10-20
> It's quite likely my "date math" syntax is wrong, but it seems
> that Postgres should either return the right result, or let me
> know something is fault.

Your syntax is right, and Postgres is wrong :(

The problem is that there is no explicit date+reltime math operator.
But, there *is* a date+int operator which assumes the int is in days,
and there *is* a "binary compatible" entry for reltime->int and vica
versa.

So, Postgres is actually doing

select date(CURRENT_DATE + int('30 days'::reltime));

but the units are "seconds" coming from reltime, and the subsequent math
assumes it was "days".

You can work around the problem with

select date(CURRENT_DATE + interval('30 days'::reltime));

or with

select date(CURRENT_DATE + '30 days'::reltime/86400);

This problem is in the current CVS tree also. A workaround of removing
the reltime==int assumed compatibility could be applied to 7.1 (I
haven't thought of what that would affect) or we can build some explicit
operators to make sure that the seconds->days conversion happens (which
would require an initdb).

btw, "interval" is to be preferred over "reltime" for most operations,
as recommended in the PostgreSQL docs on data types.

Comments?

- Thomas