timestamptypes

Timestamptypes refer to a family of data types used to record a specific moment in time. They are designed to capture date and time information and may or may not include time zone or offset data. Timestamptypes are used across databases, programming languages, and data interchange formats to enable time-based storage, querying, and display.

Common representations include textual forms such as ISO 8601 or RFC 3339 strings, binary encodings based on epoch seconds plus subsecond precision, and native language-specific types. In databases, timestamptypes often come in variants that store time with or without time zone information. For example, SQL databases frequently distinguish between TIMESTAMP WITHOUT TIME ZONE (local or naive) and TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE (often stored in UTC and converted on output). PostgreSQL uses timestamptz as its time zone aware variant and timestamp as the naive form. Programming languages provide analogous types, such as Python’s datetime with or without tzinfo, Java’s Instant and ZonedDateTime, or Go’s time.Time.

Precision and range vary by system, ranging from seconds to nanoseconds and covering wide historical to near-future dates. Interoperability relies on standardized formats and epoch-based representations to minimize discrepancies caused by time zone changes, leap seconds, or clock drift. Best practices typically favor storing times in UTC with explicit, consistently applied time zone handling at presentation time, and using sufficient precision to meet application requirements.