Re: Proposal: Store "timestamptz" of database creation on "pg_database"

On 1/2/13 11:08 PM, Fabrízio de Royes Mello wrote:
> The attached patch add a new column into 'pg_database' called
> 'datcreated' to store the timestamp of database creation.
>
> If this feature is approved I could extend it to add a column into
> 'pg_class' to store creation timestamp too.

While I'm entirely in favor of this feature in general, I think this is
the wrong way to approach it.  It will end up like the CREATE OR REPLACE
support: We add it for a few commands in one release, for a few more
commands in the next release, for almost all commands in the following
release, and now we're still not done.

If we're going to store object creation time, I think we should do it
for all objects, stored in a separate catalog, like pg_depend or
pg_description, keyed off classid, objectid.  And have a simple C
function to call to update the information stored there.

That would also make storing the modification time, which I'd ask for
next, easier.