Thanks. I appreciate the information. I have just started to delve into the coding of this program and I haven't learned all of the intricacies of it yet. However, I am having fun with it. One of the things that I like about OTRS is that it is relatively easy to manipulate the program to tailor it to your own needs. The simplicity on the way it was put together makes this easy to do even if your not a strong Perl programmer (as I am not). Thanks for the info. -----Original Message----- From: dev-bounces@otrs.org [mailto:dev-bounces@otrs.org] On Behalf Of Kristoffer Gleditsch Sent: Friday, December 17, 2004 4:17 AM To: dev@otrs.org Subject: [dev] A date is a date ... or? Hi! While stumbling around in the source tree, I noticed that the OTRS schema uses DATE for most date/time-related fields, but there are some (three, it seems) fields called xxx_time_unix of type BIGINT. Storing the epoch directly seems a lot easier when you have to do things like matching all records more than two days old, because one can just subtract 2*60*60*24 and compare it (I'm guessing this is the reason why it's done this way in web_upload_cache). However, it doesn't have to be that difficult with DATE either: use Date::Calc qw(Add_Delta_Days Today); my $timelimit = sprintf("%04d-%02d-%02d 00:00:00", Add_Delta_Days(Today(), -2)); # Or, if more precision is needed: use Date::Calc qw(Add_Delta_DHMS Today_and_Now); $timelimit = sprintf("%04d-%02d-%02d %02d:%02d:%02d", Add_Delta_DHMS(Today_and_Now(), -2, 0, 0, 0)); my $SQL = qq[ DELETE FROM foo_table WHERE create_time < ? ]; (It may be easier to do it even easier using TO_CHAR/TO_DATE.) Storing date/time in several different formats in the same database seems somewhat unfortunate. One reason for this is that the normal DATE fields are a lot easier to manipulate directly by humans. Another is that if someone should, for example, ever want to move to a timezone-aware datatype, it is a lot easier to migrate old data if it is all stored in the same format. Or am I missing a point here? If so, please tell me. :) Regards, -- Kristoffer. _______________________________________________ OTRS mailing list: dev - Webpage: http://otrs.org/ Archive: http://lists.otrs.org/pipermail/dev To unsubscribe: http://lists.otrs.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/dev