Re: Integer input functions for date and timestamp

On 22 October 2010 19:45, Brendan Jurd <direvus(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> In my own databases, I've been using a couple of C functions that
> might be useful to the wider community.
>
> They are very simple date/timestamp constructors that take integers as
> their arguments.  Nothing fancy, but very convenient and *much* faster
> than using a SQL or PL/pgSQL workaround.
>
> The offering is analogous to mktime() in C/PHP, the standard datetime
> constructors in Python, and Perl's Time::Local.  The function
> signatures pretty much speak for themselves:
>
> date(year int, month int, day int) returns date
> datetime(year int, month int, day int, hour int, minute int, second
> int) returns timestamp
>
> Without these functions (or some variation), a user wishing to
> construct a date from integers can only assemble the date into a
> string and then put that string through postgres' datetime parser,
> which is totally perverse.
>
> Is there any interest in adding this to core, or failing that,
> contrib?  If so I'd be happy to provide a patch including the
> functions themselves and some attendant documentation.
>
> I'm not wedded to the function names or argument order, and I realise
> a fully realised offering would need to include a variant for
> 'timestamp with time zone'.

What's wrong with to_timestamp() and to_date()? Sure, your functions
might be marginally faster, but I don't think that it's likely to be a
very performance sensitive area.

--
Regards,
Peter Geoghegan