[TAP] data type for column metadata

[Steve Allen]

On Wed 2009-03-25T10:23:04 -0700, Patrick Dowler hath writ:
> I take this as a proposal for one allowed iso8601 timestamp variant (mentioned
> earlier, without timezone) and a requirement that all timestamps are in UTC.

I believe that mysql, pgsql, and other RDBs object if they ascertain
that the operating system has been configured with any one of the
"right" zoneinfo files from the Olson TZ database.  Their reason is to
avoid the problems that can occur if a timestamp is given during a
leap second, for it is possible to insert such a timestamp as an
ISO-like string but afterwards the RDB cannot make sense of that.

Some astronomical applications are going to care about leap seconds.
Some astronomical applications are not going to be tied to events that
take place near the terrestrial geoid, and UTC is only defined there.
In such cases requiring UTC may not make sense.

--
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