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Archives of the TeradataForum
Message Posted: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 @ 15:39:10 GMT
| Subj: | | Re: BigINT and Timestamp |
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| From: | | Geoffrey Rommel |
| | With the coming of BIGINT (8 byte integer), is NCR planning to convert timestamps to BigINT rather than continue to use the embedded space
(between the date and time) approach it uses today? | |
I haven't heard anyone from Teradata address this question, but I'm sure the answer is no. Timestamps are stored internally as a structure of
10 bytes. All the components are binary numbers; there are no characters or spaces. The character string with space ('yyyy-mm-dd hh:mi:ss...') is
an ANSI standard for the external representation of the data. In other words, this format is used only when importing or exporting timestamps; it
is not used internally.
I'm not sure how you are envisioning using bigints, but if for instance you wanted to store a timestamp as the number of microseconds since
1970-01-01 00:00:00.00, you would have to perform this conversion yourself.
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