Hi, One of our customers is interested in being able to store original timezone along with a certain timestamp.
It is currently possible to store a TZ in a separate column, but this is a bit wasteful and not very convenient anyway. There are all sorts of UI issues that need to be resolved in order for this to be a complete feature proposal, but the first thing that we discussed was what is the storage going to look like. Of course, one thing we don't want is to store the complete TZ name as text. So the first thing is cataloguing timezone names, and assigning an ID to each (maybe an OID). If we do that, then we can store the OID of the timezone name along the int64/float8 of the actual timestamp value. Right now we rely on the tzdata files on disk for things like pg_timezone_names and other accesses of TZ data; so the files are the authoritative source of TZ info. So we need to ensure that whenever the files are updated, the catalogs are updated as well. I think we could make this work if we "refreshed" the catalog from the files on SIGHUP if the directory changes (say, a new timezone is created). Note that I am currently proposing to store only the zone names in the catalog, not the full TZ data. Are there objections to the general idea? If not, I'll flesh a more complete proposal. -- Álvaro Herrera <alvhe...@commandprompt.com> -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers