Re: Understanding TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE

On 01/18/2013 09:31 AM, Robert James wrote:
> I'd like to better understand TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE.
>
> My understanding is that, contrary to what the name sounds like, the
> time zone is never stored. It simply stores a UTC timestamp,
> identical to what TIMESTAMP WITHOUT TIME ZONE stores.
>
> And then the only difference is that WITH TIME ZONE will allow you to
> specify an offset in a literal value when INSERTing or UPDATEing ?
> That sounds to me like a conversion or function - why is that a
> different data type?

Probably for the same reason char and varchar are. They both just store
a string but in one the string is padded in the other it is not.
Basically WITH TIME ZONE tells Postgres that the field is time zone aware.

>
>

--
Adrian Klaver
adrian(dot)klaver(at)gmail(dot)com