Re: timestamp with time zone ~> GMT

On Mon, 3 Feb 2025 at 11:21, Álvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)alvh(dot)no-ip(dot)org> wrote:

> On 2025-Feb-03, Robert Treat wrote:
>
> > This does seem to come up often enough that it probably is worth being
> > a bit more explicit about how this works; attached patch attempts
> > that.
>
> LGTM.
>
> > Note, I dropped the bit about GMT; that change was made ~40 years ago,
> > and I suspect it is close to noise for many people these days, though
> > it could be added back if folks feel strongly about it.
>
> I don't feel strongly about it, but another option might be to add a
> <footnote> so that it is still there but less intrusive. Grepping for
> GMT in the postgres repo there are still over 1400 matches of all kinds.
>
> > As Tom notes above, what to store is debatable, and generally seems to
> > conflate storage and display desires together, which makes it hard to
> > imagine a generic enough implementation to put into core, but there
> > are some attempts to solve this problem floating around in extension
> > land. See
> https://github.com/mweber26/timestampandtz/blob/master/README.md
> > as one such attempt.
>
> Another simple option is to store a timezone name in a separate column,
> which you can then use in the AT TIME ZONE clause. This is of course
> more wasteful than storing a 2-byte zone identifier as the
> timestampandtz extension does.
>

If anything I'd advocate creating a type which stored both. Storing the TZ
in another column would complicate things if the data were to be sent in
binary.
Is there a case where we would send two attributes for one in binary ?

Dave