On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 6:15 PM, Brion Vibber <bvib...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > In 2001 when Magnus was writing the initial attempt at a custom wiki engine > in PHP backed by MySQL, he chose to use the TIMESTAMP column type. > > TIMESTAMPs in MySQL 3 were automatically filled out by the server at INSERT > time, normalized to UTC, and exposed in the 14-digit YYYYMMDDHHMMSS format > we still know and love today.
By the way, if we had to design this from the scratch, TIMESTAMPs now allow to not be auto set https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/timestamp-initialization.html This would save 15 - 4 = 11 bytes per row. However, both in code and migration effort + potential bugs + backwards compatibility, this is not worth it. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
