Re: Inconsistent behavior with TIMESTAMP WITHOUT and epoch

Tom,

> I don't believe there is anything wrong here.  extract(epoch) is defined
> to produce the equivalent Unix timestamp, and that's what it's doing.
> See the thread at
> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-bugs/2003-02/msg00069.php

Darn.  I missed that discussion, I'd have argued with Thomas (not that I ever
*won* such an argument ...)

The problem with the current functionality is that it makes it impossible to
get a GMT Unix timestamp out of a TIMESTAMP WITHOUT TIME ZONE without string
manipulation.   And for an application where you want the timestamps to be
location-agnostic (such as this one, with servers on east and west coasts,
and some talk about London), you want your timestamps stored as GMT.

However, having changed it in 7.3, I agree that we'll just cause trouble
changing it back.

--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco