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From: jas@ernie.Berkeley.EDU (Jim Shankland)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: Ingres ESQL/C & Unix date formats
Message-ID: <26900@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 20 Nov 88 23:10:50 GMT
References: <42@melba.oz>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: jas@ernie.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Jim Shankland)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 23

In article <42@melba.oz> gnb@melba.oz.au (Gregory Bond) writes:
! I'm trying to use embedded SQL from C, calling the ingres database to
! extract and process data.  The problem I'm having is converting Ingres
! dates to unix time(3)-style dates (i.e. #secs since 1/1/70).
! 
! Ingres insists on considering dates as 26 character strings.
! The best solution I can find is something like
! 	[ick...]
! which almost seems to work, but problems with timezones seem to make
! this unreliable (we just went on to DST here...) as Ingres is converting
! the '1/1/70' to local time....  Not to mention SLOW.

Here's one suggestion that may or may not work for you:  forget the 'date'
datatype, and store your dates as i4's representing seconds since 
1/1/70, GMT.  You lose in the terminal monitor, where you find yourself
staring at large integers instead of anything meaningful to a human;
but your ESQL/C program gets to do whatever it wants with timezones,
formatting, etc.

Jim Shankland
jas@ernie.berkeley.edu

"Work, knowledge, and love are the wellsprings of human existence" -- Reich