From: David Vallner <david@...>
Date: 2006-10-16T12:04:34+09:00
Subject: Re: [OT] Ruby DateTime and MySQL datetime

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Roseanne Zhang wrote:
> Yes, I used MySQL timestamp, which is better since it initialize itself=
=20
> if you don't.
>=20

Which is an idiosyncracy of MySQL I resent, but that's sidetracking.
Also, it's only convenient to store server-side times, and because of
the automagical behaviour, at best record creation / update times.

(Hands up who remembers to set the MySQL connection timezone depending
on the HTTP request client locale?)

User-input times will need massaging to convert them from his local
timezone to a canonical representation anyway, often can be optional,
when relying on MySQL specifics will shoot yourself in the foot as it's
completely impossible for the first timestamp column to contain a SQL
null ever, and a UNIX epoch timestamp is the a representation I'd prefer
on accounts of being widely supported, compact, and trivial and
efficient to do comparison and computation with, followed by an ISO
textual notation on accounts of being as standard as they get.

David Vallner


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