Re: Datetime

On Aug 3, 2004, at 7:23 PM, Achilleus Mantzios wrote:

> now() returns the current UNIX (your running UNIX right?) timestamp 
> which
> in turn is
> measured in seconds,miliseconds since the epoch.
> i.e. 1970-01-01 00:00:00

I believe this is incorrect. I believe PostgreSQL uses its own 
timestamp datatype internally (which is, indeed, not as text in an 
easy-to-read form). On my machine (running cvs-head),

test=# select now();              now
------------------------------- 2004-08-03 20:27:18.822646+09
(1 row)

which is definitely not seconds.milliseconds since epoch. You can use 
extract to get seconds.milliseconds from epoch, but I don't think this 
is how it's stored internally.

test=# select extract(epoch from now());    date_part
----------------- 1091532506.3222
(1 row)

Just some additional trivia, current_timestamp is an SQL-spec compliant 
alias for now(), and might be a better choice if one is concerned with 
compatibility.

Michael Glaesemann
grzm myrealbox com