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Great question! In my experience human readability is pretty important when you are debugging or working with SQL in a raw form (running random, ad-hoc queries

Great question! In my experience human readability is pretty important when you are debugging or working with SQL in a raw form (running random, ad-hoc queries). Storing unix epoch is fine and sometimes I do it but more recently I just realised that unless I am working with a database with billions of rows storing a human readable text is fine.

hnarn 5y ago
> In my experience human readability is pretty important when you are debugging or working with SQL in a raw form (running random, ad-hoc queries). I agree, but most databases have functions for this. MySQL example: > SELECT FROM_UNIXTIME(1196440219); -> '2007-11-30 10:30:19' I would claim this reinforces the benefit of unix timestamps because now you're getting it back in your local time (or whatever you choose to convert it to: SET time_zone), not whatever time it happened to be put into the database as. For MySQL there's a more important point though: * Storing timestamps in MySQL as pure text is simply wrong since MySQL has abstractions for timestamps (like the TIMESTAMP type)[1] and not using this is a completely unnecessary violation of good practice * In the case we're discussing (no abstractions available, INT only) I would still say that unix timestamps brings the rather huge benefit of ensuring that all data is put in correctly: there is no way to sanitize inputs with a string column and ensure that the same timezone is always used, at least not without a bunch of extra an unnecessary code. [1]: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/datetime.html https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/datetime.html