On Thu, 12 Aug 2021 at 20:07, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > > Bruce Momjian <br...@momjian.us> writes: > > On Thu, Aug 12, 2021 at 07:24:58PM +0100, Simon Riggs wrote: > >> I heard the moan about "Why doesn't TIMESTAMP mean TIMESTAMP WITH TIME > >> ZONE" again today, so here is something concrete to address that. > >> > >> AFAIK, SQL Standard requires the default to be WITHOUT TIME ZONE, but > >> nobody seems to think that is useful. > > Standards compliance is useful, no? If it isn't, there are about 1001 > other things nobody much likes about SQL. > > >> We even added a specially > >> optimized ALTER TABLE command to make switching from WITHOUT to WITH > >> TIME ZONE easy, so it is clearly an important thing to solve. > >> > >> So add a parameter called > >> default_timestamp_with_timezone = off (default) | on > > > I thought we found that changing behavior via GUC usually ends badly. > > Yeah. Changing from SQL-spec to not-SQL-spec behavior is going to be > one tough sell to begin with, even without the point that that's been > our behavior for over two decades. But proposing to do it via a GUC > is just not-even-worth-discussing territory. That would force every > wannabe-portable program to cope with both behaviors; which would > end up meaning that not only do you still have to take care to write > WITH TIME ZONE when you want that, but *also* you'd have to be sure > to write WITHOUT TIME ZONE when you want that. In short, the worst > of both worlds.
All of which I agree with, but this wasn't a cute idea of mine, this was what our users have requested because of the extreme annoyance caused by the current behavior. -- Simon Riggs http://www.EnterpriseDB.com/
