[TYPO3-english] Difference empty dates and 1/1/70 date

[Xavier Perseguers]

Hi,

> On 16-9-2010 8:03, Dmitry Dulepov wrote:
>> Jigal van Hemert wrote:
>>> Unfortunately TYPO3 has currently no other date/time type with a wider
>>> range. Even FLOW3 has only a date/time type which is stored (sorry, I
>>> mean "persisted") in a Unix timestamp (integer database field).
>>
>> Oh, this is is disappointing :( I thought FLOW3 will finally use proper
>> database fields...

Me too.

> Internally FLOW3 uses a PHP DateTime object (with a range of 10,000 BC -
> 10,000 AD), but when "persisting" the data it converts it to a Unix
> timestamp to put it in an integer field.

bad!

> I discussed this in the flow3.general list (posting to flow3.teams.core
> only resulted in error messages that posting was denied...) and it seems
> to be done this way because a field type had to be used which was
> supported by all DBMS.

DATE/DATETIME datatype is supported by any decent DBMS. Timestamp are 
unfriendly when accessing the data directly (e.g, phpMyAdmin) and not 
being able to store a date < 1970 as of September 2010 seems really weird!

Xavier