alt Hacker NewsDrives me crazy that the engineers I work with are perfectly happy writing TZ-less datetime strings to the hundreds of tables we manage. Every user has to guess, or be informed, that they’re UTC.
Replies
SkiFire13 • today at 7:24 AM
> Every user has to guess, or be informed, that they’re UTC.
At least they are UTC and not EST or PST...
jiggawatts • today at 4:53 AM
They must yearn for the before times when text could be in an encoding specified only as: "your guess is as good mine!"
In cases where the data itself doesn't carry the unit (or TZ in this case), I usually ask that the unit-less columns at least include the unit in the name. A TZ-less column is not that bad if it is suffixed "UTC", e.g. `ExecutionTimeUtc`.
There are probably real world cases where dropping the TZ/offset provides meaningful performance/storage savings, but it hasn't been the typical case in my current sector.