Re: Why data of timestamptz does not store value of timezone passed to it?

From: Kevin Grittner <kgrittn(at)ymail(dot)com>
To: Steve Crawford <scrawford(at)pinpointresearch(dot)com>, rohtodeveloper <rohtodeveloper(at)outlook(dot)com>, PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: Why data of timestamptz does not store value of timezone passed to it?
Date: 2014-08-28 18:26:53
Message-ID: 1409250413.67542.YahooMailNeo@web122306.mail.ne1.yahoo.com
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Steve Crawford <scrawford(at)pinpointresearch(dot)com> wrote:

> I have always considered "timestamp with time zone" to be a bad
> description of that data type but it appears to be a carryover
> from the specs. It is really a "point in time"

I agree.  While what timestamptz implements is a very useful data
type, I think it was a very unfortunate decision to implement that
for the standard type name, instead of something more consistent
with the spec.  It seems very unlikely to change, though, because
so much existing production code would break.  :-(

Understandably, people do tend to expect that saving something into
a column defined as TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE will save a time zone
with the timestamp, and in PostgreSQL it does not.

--
Kevin Grittner
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company

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