Hi Angie The rule of thumb is to start normalized, ideally with a 3NF, then only de-normalize for a good reason (mainly performance). I think this case is a very legitimate example where normalization is warranted. By using fine tuned queries the volume of data that is retrieved is much less than getting it all in and sifting through it in PHP. This leaves the DATETIME instead of a Unix timestamp issue. There must have been a good reason for doing it this way back when Drupal started. Maybe it was interoperability between PostgreSQL and MySQL, maybe it was something else. However, I have found cases where this is really annoying, for example, when you want to do date arithmetic, intervals, ..etc. in the SQL engine and not retrieve the data from the database and do the processing in PHP.