Actually I don't believe "20070202T1422" is a legal 8601 timestamp. My read of the partial ABNF below requires you to designate the time zone with a "Z" or a s

Actually I don't believe "20070202T1422" is a legal 8601 timestamp. My read of the partial ABNF below requires you to designate the time zone with a "Z" or a specific offset (e.g. +08:00). time-secfrac = "." 1*DIGIT time-numoffset = ("+" / "-") time-hour ":" time-minute time-offset = "Z" / time-numoffset partial-time = time-hour ":" time-minute ":" time-second [time-secfrac] full-date = date-fullyear "-" date-month "-" date-mday full-time = partial-time time-offset date-time = full-date "T" full-time If your data is going to stick around a while (and possibly loaded into some other system in the future) you should be sure to encode the timezone.