Unlike "pick" time/dates, milliseconds from 1970-01-01 00:00 UTC or "epoch" is locality independant. If you have an application distributed over time zones, and recording events sequentially is important to you, then you will want to know that an event that occured at 16:00 in Melbourne actually occured BEFORE an event at 15:00 in Perth*. Using milliseconds from epoch will give you a sequentially correct numeric stamp with intrinsic date/time information whereas "pick" time date will require 2 fields and a bit more work to convert between time zones.
To convert the epoch value to a local date/time is simple, however, if the location that the recording event occured was not the same as the location that the conversion program is running in then you would need to take the time zone of the recording event into account when you do the conversion. This gets more complex and is a good reason for IBM to include ISO 8601 standard conversion routines in U2! See wiki http://www.pickwiki.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OpenQuestions Cheers, Stuart -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Dawn M. Wolthuis Sent: Wednesday, 28 January 2004 13:30 To: 'U2 Users Discussion List' Subject: RE: Converting between Java/UniData dates Why in the world did that do that? Is it in WebAdvisor? So, in the Datatel Colleague and Benefactor products there are hundreds if not thousands of PICK dates and exactly 1 Java date stored? I guess the good thing about standards is that everyone can come up with their own, eh? Smiles. --dawn Dawn M. Wolthuis Tincat Group, Inc. www.tincat-group.com Take and give some delight today. ********************************************************************** This email message and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of addressed recipient(s). If you have received this email in error please notify the Spotless IS Support Centre (61 3 9269 7555) immediately who will advise further action. This footnote also confirms that this email message has been scanned for the presence of computer viruses. ********************************************************************** _______________________________________________ u2-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.oliver.com/mailman/listinfo/u2-users