[jira] Commented: (AVRO-739) Add Date/Time data types

["Ron Bodkin (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AVRO-739?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=12986729#action_12986729 ] 

Ron Bodkin commented on AVRO-739:
---------------------------------

>From the discussion on the users list, I agree that it'd be great to start with a simple timestamp, which gets serialized as a long. Let's start with a simple feature, and future enhancements can be tracked separately.

Doug proposed this design:


I noted that it would be nice to allow some flexibility in the implementation
classes for dates, e.g., letting Java users use Joda time classes as well
as java.util.Date

Scott said:
Absolutely.  This is a per-language feature though, so it may not require
much of the spec.  For example, in Java it could simply be a configuration
parameter passed to the DatumReader/Writers.  It doesn't make a lot of
sense to store metadata on the data that says "this is a Joda object, not
java.util.Date" -- that is a user choice and not intrinsic to describing
the data.

My input: 
I agree this shouldn't be part of the serialized format. It would be nice to
have a clean way to specify the configuration/mappings used that allows
for specifying the mappings for more such org.apache.avro data types. It
also should be supported for reflection and code generation approaches, as well.

Scott also said:
There are other questions too -- what are the timestamp units
(milliseconds? configurable?), what is the origin (1970? 2010?
configurable?) -- these decisions affect the serialization size.

My input:
I would like to see a format that allows storing data at the precision of popular libraries and languages (java.util.Date, Joda time, Python datetime, etc.). Having a long representing microseconds since Jan. 1 1970 seems like a good compromise for general purpose use. It supports higher precision libraries and still allows representing a few hundred thousand years of data. Some libraries do allow nanosecond resolution - but limiting to 270 years seems like a bigger limitation than microsecond precision.



> Add Date/Time data types
> ------------------------
>
>                 Key: AVRO-739
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AVRO-739
>             Project: Avro
>          Issue Type: New Feature
>          Components: spec
>            Reporter: Jeff Hammerbacher
>


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