SQLite is great but its decision in not having a standard datetime/timestamp datatype -- a standard in all other relational databases -- has always struck me as

SQLite is great but its decision in not having a standard datetime/timestamp datatype -- a standard in all other relational databases -- has always struck me as a surprising omission, but in retrospect I kind of understand why. Datetimes are undeniably difficult. So sqlite leaves the datetime storage decision to the user: either TEXT, REAL or INTEGER [1]. This means certain datetime optimizations are not available, depending on what the user chooses. If one needs to ETL data with datetimes, a priori knowledge of the datetime type a file is encoded in is needed. In that sense, sqlite really is a "file-format with a query language" rather than a "small database". [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17227110/how-do-datetime-values-work-in-sqlite https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17227110/how-do-datetime...