> Since date/time is stored as an offset in some units from an epoch of some > type, the "datatype" declaration is nothing more than an annotation of an > already existing double or integer type -- and you can already annotate your > select column names and table attribute type declarations just fine.
The problem is not only about storing an arbitrary integer or float number. A date is much more, it has timezone information with it, and I would like to see a DATE column handle this in a proper and well-defined way, just as a calendar (CalDAV) does handle it, so it would allow me to convert between e.g. EST and CEST or calculating time differences (e.g. working time in a company). I know many of this is somehow possible now as well, but as far as I know, not really compliant with other RDMSs. It's not only the date type itself, I miss some other useful aids as well. MariaDB/MySQL for example have the "DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP" feature, useful for having a "last modified" column to track changes. SQLite requires me to define a trigger which is quite complex as one has to declare each column except for the "last modified" one to avoid a recursive trigger. Beyond data/time, a great improvement would be support for geodata. SQLite has become quite popular for GIS applications (e.g. QGIS, but also ArcGIS) using Spatialite and/or GeoPackage. Currently, there is no GEOMETRY data type so both store geometries in BLOBs ensuring proper functionality with a whole bunch of triggers. This leads to many problems, for example when renaming tables or columns. I often had inconsistencies and needed to manually adjust the "geometry_columns" table (which also would be obsolete then, leading to much cleaner database layout) to make things working again. Please apologize: I do not want to offend anyone, it's just my opinion. I appreciate SQLite being a great thing and I don't know a better embedded database (one can forget about Firebird, etc.). But in my everyday work I always find some issues that could make a great thing perfect if they were implemented :-) _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@mailinglists.sqlite.org http://mailinglists.sqlite.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
