[development] no date / time types in schema API

[David Timothy Strauss]

----- "Ivan Sergio Borgonovo" <mail at webthatworks.it> wrote:

> You're not forced to store dates with tz but having a data type that
> understand tz and support tz operations inside the DB is pretty
> helpful.
> 
> Again... suppose you store datetime in GMT and you want to know who
> had a beer before 1:00am local time maybe during a DTS change [evil
> grin]?
> a tz is not an integer. You can't compute the interval on the PHP
> side and you don't want to return all the times and filter on the PHP
> side either.

I have never written an application that needed to answer a time question based on the local time for all rows.

Your proposal of using date/time columns in the database doesn't fix it, either. You can't query based on "local time" even if MySQL knows all the timezone data.

> Anyway tz support across different DB looks much harder to handle
> than different date format since the "interface" is much more
> heterogeneous.

That is also a problem.

> > Oh, and good luck dealing with your DB server sometimes having a
> > different timezone than your web server.
> 
> That's life. Anyway MySQL as well as PostgreSQL provide nifty
> settings to cope with the problem.

Why cope when you can avoid the problem entirely?