Date and Time or Timestamp?

Greetings again!

I have a small dilemma here and I'm not sure if it's just me making
problems or not. My question is this: how far into the future can I
expect a Timestamp to be valid? I've seen some conflicting reports ...

On CMD's Practical Postgres page
<http://www.commandprompt.com/ppbook/index.lxp?lxpwrap=x2632%2ehtm>,
Table 3-14 claims a timestamp has a range of 1903AD to 2037AD.

But Josh Berkus disputes that in his Working with Dates and Times in
PostgreSQL FAQ
<http://techdocs.postgresql.org/techdocs/faqdatesintervals.php>,
claiming timestamps have a useful range of 4713BC to over 100,000AD.

So which is right? I think timestamps are easier for me to deal with,
since I'm accessing/creating entries from WebObjects (which has a
NSTimestamp object with looks like it will match up nicely to
postgresql's timestamp), but the thought of dealing with a Y-2037 bug
when I'm pushing 70 makes my spine cold. I thought I'd deal with this
by separating Dates and Times (shouldn't be a problem ... Dates should
be good past 32000AD at least and I don't expect much else to survive
that long:-), but that seems much more difficult in the WO context ...

Am I making this harder than it should be?


Dave Stewart
Aqua-flo Supply (Goleta)
dstewart@aquaflo.com

There are only two industries that refer to their customers as "users".
       -Edward Tufte