Re: Alter timestamp without timezone to with timezone rewrites rows

This is indeed true but examples that use the textual representation of the data don't support the claim.  Both types effectively store a point-in-time in UTC, the "with timezone" just does so explicitly - but the behavior for conversions from "without timezone" treat the stored time as being UTC as well.  It would be possible to simply store a timezone-less timestamp in both cases and assume UTC (or not) when displaying the value based upon whether the datatype of the value is determined to be "with timezone" or not (the former also undergoing rotation based upon the runtime value of the timezone setting).  The fact that pg_attribute is required to interpret the data suggests that the stored data doesn't care about its named datatype and that runtime interpretation of the value based upon datatype would be possible.

To be clear, I don't envision the current status changing - we were able to avoid a rewrite with varchar(n) -> text because the stored data was indeed identical.  Reading the documentation it does say, though maybe not as explicitly as it could, that the physical storage of a timestamptz includes an explicit UTC data component ("the internally stored value is always in UTC") while the storage of a timestamp does not (i.e., there is no such verbiage).

David J.