Re: Fwd: Re: [GENERAL] timestamp/function question

[will trillich]

On Wed, Mar 28, 2001 at 11:46:42PM -0800, Soma Interesting wrote:
 
 blah blah blah snip
 
 ...and that all meant what? The postgres manual is open to much 
 interpretation to anyone new trying to understand its contents. Combine 
 that with documentation that's still not written, or broken across several 
 different sections (programmer, user, admin, etc) and a search engine 
 which returns absolute crap well I guess us new users can just go use 
 MySQL.
 
 as far as I can tell the above sounds like a complicated  work-around to a 
 bug, but maybe you'll be kind enough to correct me on this...?
 
 BETTER YET!
 
 edit my example code so it works and post it to this list so everyone else 
 can have a function that uses ''now'' as actually "this very moment in 
 time", rather than "the moment the main parser made 'now' a constant".
 
 Yeesh!

try

\df time

and see what's available. notably,

select timeofday(),timenow();

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Re: [GENERAL] timestamp/function question

[Tom Lane]

Soma Interesting [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
 Why does the following code return the exact same value each time, instead 
 of a value based on the current time?

 CREATE FUNCTION memb_num () RETURNS INT4 AS '
   BEGIN
   RETURN date_part(''epoch'', CURRENT_DATE);
   END;
 ' LANGUAGE 'plpgsql';

Because you asked for a value based on the current *date*.
If you waited till tomorrow and tried again, then you'd get a
different answer.  Perhaps you want

RETURN date_part(''epoch'', CURRENT_TIMESTAMP);

regards, tom lane

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Re: [GENERAL] timestamp/function question

[Soma Interesting]

At 12:41 AM 3/29/2001 -0600, you wrote:
do. In the case of logfunc1(), the Postgres main parser knows
when preparing the plan for the INSERT, that the string 'now'
should be interpreted as datetime because the target field of
logtable is of that type. Thus, it will make a constant from it
at this time and this constant value is then used in all
invocations of logfunc1() during the lifetime of the backend.
Needless to say that this isn't what the programmer wanted.

In the case of logfunc2(), the Postgres main parser does not know
what type 'now' should become and therefor it returns a datatype
of text containing the string 'now'. During the assignment to the
local variable curtime, the PL/pgSQL interpreter casts this
string to the datetime type by calling the text_out() and
datetime_in() functions for the conversion.


blah blah blah snip

...and that all meant what? The postgres manual is open to much 
interpretation to anyone new trying to understand its contents. Combine 
that with documentation that's still not written, or broken across several 
different sections (programmer, user, admin, etc) and a search engine which 
returns absolute crap well I guess us new users can just go use MySQL.

as far as I can tell the above sounds like a complicated  work-around to a 
bug, but maybe you'll be kind enough to correct me on this...?


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Fwd: Re: [GENERAL] timestamp/function question

[Soma Interesting]

blah blah blah snip

...and that all meant what? The postgres manual is open to much 
interpretation to anyone new trying to understand its contents. Combine 
that with documentation that's still not written, or broken across several 
different sections (programmer, user, admin, etc) and a search engine 
which returns absolute crap well I guess us new users can just go use 
MySQL.

as far as I can tell the above sounds like a complicated  work-around to a 
bug, but maybe you'll be kind enough to correct me on this...?

BETTER YET!

edit my example code so it works and post it to this list so everyone else 
can have a function that uses ''now'' as actually "this very moment in 
time", rather than "the moment the main parser made 'now' a constant".

Yeesh!


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