TIMESTAMP and DATETIME is how dates and times, or temporal, data
is represented ion MySQL. These types are combined with a bunch
of operators on these types, such as ADDATE and TIME_FORMAT and
such. So is this enough to effectively manage temporal data then?
Nope, in my mind, far from it.
To begin with, time isn't such a simple type of data as we might
look at it. Is a date just a count of the number of seconds since
00:00:00 on Jan 1 1970 or something like that? And we then
convert it to a calendar and all is fine? Is time data really
linear in that sense? No, it's not. Dec 24 2010 is Christmas Eve
and when you get your Christmas gifts here in Sweden. Is this
significant? Also, it's a Friday. That this data is a Friday can
be calculated from the date or the seconds-since-jan-1-1970
counter, but that is a different thing. Looking at that counter,
you cannot see that there is no way to look at that number and
figure out that this day is …
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Oct
24
2010
Showing entries 1 to 1