Jeremy Finzel <finzelj@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > We often prefer to use timestamptz or "timestamp with time zone" in our > environment because of its actually storing "objective time" with respect > to UTC. But in my own work experience, I have scarcely encountered a case > where business users, and software engineers, do not actually think it > means the opposite. Yeah, it's confusing :-(. > I do believe this is part of the SQL standard, Actually not, or at least the standard thinks the type should behave differently from this. They think it should store a local timestamp and then separately a GMT offset. The way it works in PG was dreamed up ~20 years ago by Tom Lockhart, and in retrospect it was not a great idea for him to have used the SQL-standard type name for something with not-SQL-standard behavior. However, at this point, it's not clear how we could change it without causing truly enormous backwards-compatibility pain. If it were a fringe-usage type, maybe we could get away with a renaming, but it's certainly not that. > So it seems to me that "timestamp with time zone" is a misnomer in a big > way, and perhaps it's worth at least clarifying the docs about this, Don't the docs describe the behavior pretty clearly already? regards, tom lane
