Re: [stellation-res] Firebird timestamps

["Mark C. Chu-Carroll" <mcc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2003-03-12 at 08:29, Jonathan Gossage wrote:
> The current version of Firebird (v1.02) does not support the BIGINT data
> type which we use for storing time stamps. I see three possible solutions to
> this problem.
> 
> 1. Upgrade to using Firebird (v1.5) which does support BIGINT. This release
> is currently in Beta 3 and they are hoping to have an official release by
> the end of March/early April time frame.
> 
> 2. Use the TIMESTAMP data type for Firebird and BIGINT for other databases.
> 
> 3. Use TIMESTAMP as the default data type for time stamps. Is there a reason
> why we have not done this before?

Yes, there is. It doesn't end up working very well. In fact, in
postgres, it doesn't really work at all. The timestamp parsing stuff
in postgres doesn't work very well at all, and leads to frequent and
unpredictable crashes.

I've been trying (when I have time) to get firebird working under Linux,
and I'm using 1.5 beta. Given that it's a pretty solid beta, and it's
due to become official very shortly, my preference is to use the 1.5.

As a possible workaround, in Rodolpho's original firebird port, he used
a fixed numeric type that was long enough to handle bigints. You can
look back to earlier versions of the firebird support to see exactly
what he used.

	-Mark
-- 
Mark Craig Chu-Carroll,  IBM T.J. Watson Research Center  
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