Re: Support for DATETIMEOFFSET

Andreas Karlsson wrote:
> On 4/10/20 3:19 PM, Jeremy Morton wrote:
>> Oh well.  Guess I keep using SQL Server then.  datetimeoffset makes
>> it impossible for developers to make the mistake of forgetting to
>> use UTC instead of local datetime, and for that reason alone it
>> makes it invaluable in my opinion.  It should be used universally
>> instead of datetime.
>
> I think that the timestamptz type already helps out a lot with that
> since it accepts input strings with a time zone offest (e.g.
> '2020-04-10 17:19:39+02') and converts it to UTC after parsing the
> timestamp. In fact I would argue that it does so with fewer pitfalls
> than the datetimeoffset type since with timestamptz everything you
> read will have the same time zone while when you read a datetimeoffset
> column you will get the time zone used by the application which
> inserted it originally, and if e.g. one of the application servers
> have a different time zone (let's say the sysadmin forgot to set it to
> UTC and it runs in local time) you will get a mix which will make bugs
> hard to spot.

I don't understand how that makes bugs hard to spot. And if the "mix"
is confusing, you could easily set up a view that converts all the
datetimeoffset's to UTC datetimes.

> I am not saying there isn't a use case for something like
> datetimeoffset, I think that there is. For example in some kind of

Surely the fact that you'll lose data if you try to store a common
.NET datatype with any kind of ORM (eg. EF, which is pretty popular)
right now, using "the world's most advanced open source relational
database", is reason enough to support it?

--
Best regards,
Jeremy Morton (Jez)