I agree. One issue I can think of is that if you store each timestamp as a (seconds,timezone) pair, the storage requirements will balloon, since timezone can be something like "Australia/Sydney" and this will be repeated for every value in the table. I don't know how to deal easily with this since there is no unique identifier to timezones and no implicit order.
The only solution I can think of is have initdb create a pg_timezones table which assigns an OID to each timezone it finds. Then the type can use that.
I think this is a good solution actually, any thoughts?
Using OID's is a good idea, but I think a canonical list of known timezone to OID mappings must be maintained and shipped with the PostgreSQL core.
If OID's are generated at initdb time, there's a great risk that the OID's will differ between databases using different versions of PostgreSQL. That in turn will have some negative implications for data exchange.
Regards, Thomas Hallgren
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