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It depends on the implementation and definition of “datetime” in whatever you’re working with. Taking Postgres as an example:

date: the concept of a calendar date (Your birthday)

timestamp: the concept of of a calendar datetime (You should get a new years kiss at 2022-01-01 00:00)

timestamptz: the concept of a precise moment in history (This comment was written at xxx time utc)

You can design a system where timestamps/datetimes are considered to be precise moments in time, utc, but that’s a matter of the impmentation you’re dealing with. Again, postgres does not assume timestamps as being in UTC (which has messed me up on more than one occasion).



Dates from times are a minefield.

I just had a long-standing bug come to the fore because I shifted a view to a materialized view, and embedded deep down in it was a date cast from a time stamp with tome zone.

When running as a view, everything was done in the user's time zone (because tits set per connection). When it’s a materialized view, it's he refresher's time zone.

This led to some inconsistencies, as the server is properly but inconveniently in UTC.




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