Why does the stuff I like cease being made

[cjolley]

You will have to define them as types or something though. Otherwise how will the presentation layer know what to do with them?
nls just stands for National Language Support. Dates area a good example because they are displayed differently in a lot of different countries.

[VJ]

You will have to define them as types or something though. Otherwise how will the presentation layer know what to do with them?
nls just stands for National Language Support. Dates area a good example because they are displayed differently in a lot of different countries.

My girlfriend had huge issues with the datetime type in postgresql, due to daylight saving corrections. Her data was in GMT (10 years of weather data, at 15 minute intervals), but the database applied a daylight saving correction when querying the data. Huge mess...

[cjolley]

I'd be tempted to set everything on the machine, os and db to gmt. And I think you can tell both to ignore dts.
Thank God I don't have to deal with that.

[VJ]

PC was installed by sysadmin, and system time was set to local time (windows default). The postgresql installation did not ask for a time zone setting, and just chose the system default. The database was created as such, but the import of data worked: it came from a CSV file containing GMT data. The issue surfaced when querying the database (it did an on-the-fly-conversion), but now changing the database time setting causes it to be converted (which she doesn't want). She has a solution now (by setting the time zone setting to UTC for each session, prior to querying), but it is still something that requires additional attention.

It is a bit similar to the problems I have: Polish Windows, where they use a comma for decimal point. And then Open Office which does not read the system settings and uses a period for a decimal point but Excel that does read system settings. And then you have big issues copying data between different programs. After it occurred, I of course changed the system's regional settings, but it caused some problems before doing that. And still some files have the wrong setting embedded.

[Umfriend]

Oh yeah, I just loved those flat-text data files using comma's to seperate fields..... and to group digits...

[cjolley]

Oh yeah, I just loved those flat-text data files using comma's to seperate fields..... and to group digits...

I've gotten to where I use tilde "~" or pipe "|" to separate data fields.

[Umfriend]

Pipe. Since early 90s. In fact, never used csv. Ever. But he, I gotta deal with what I receive sometimes.

[cjolley]

Oh mssql definitely has national language support in it. As does Windows itself.

Of course there are really only a few data types in databases. It's all masking as far as how you see it even in a data browser.

PS you shouldn't use a number type for postal codes. Some countries have characters in their postal codes.

PPS. Just to make it a bit scarier, Oracle stores numbers as strings of base 100 digits inside the database.