Re: [stellation-res] Firebird timestamps

["Jonathan Gossage" <jonathan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark C. Chu-Carroll" <mcc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Stellation-res" <stellation-res@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2003 9:46 AM
Subject: Re: [stellation-res] Firebird timestamps


> 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.
>

OK - lets go with 1.5. That is my preference also.

> 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
> --

Regards

Jonathan