Gnucash 2.3.7 released

[Derek Atkins]

Quoting Klaus Dahlke <klaus.dahlke at gmx.de>:

> On Tue, 6 Oct 2009 22:43:58 -0400
> Phil Longstaff <plongstaff at rogers.com> wrote:
>
>> Announcement: GnuCash 2.3.7 Release
>> 2009-10-07
>>
>> GnuCash 2.3.7 released
>>
>> The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.3.7, the eighth of
>> several unstable 2.3.x releases of the GnuCash Free Accounting 
>> Software which
>> will eventually lead to the stable version 2.4.0. With this new release
>> series, GnuCash can use an SQL database using SQLite3, MySQL or 
>> PostgreSQL. It
>> runs on GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris, Microsoft Windows and Mac OSX. 
>> This release
>> is intended for developers and testers who want to help tracking down all
>> those bugs that are still in there.
>>
> Hi Phil,
> I have a question of data storage when using the database backend: 
> the field post_date is a timesamp wtihout timezone and stores the 
> date in UTC. Thus, a record of posted 2009-01-01 is stored in the 
> database as '2008-12-31 23:00:00' (I am in GMT+1). Running now some 
> sql reports unsing the date_trunc('year', post_date') would move that 
> posting into previous year. Could 'post_date' be chnaged to a 
> timestamp with timezone? That would make using other reporting tools 
> (like ruby on rails) easier to handle.

There's no need.. Just tell your date_trunc function to treat the date as UTC
and ask it to translate to local TimeZone.  You only need to store a TZ
when you don't know a priori what local tz the data is in.  In this case,
the data is always in UTC.

Note, however, there are definitely issues with the post_date...  But we
should still store it in UTC.  The problem is that there is historical
data stored at "weird" times, and we need to fix that.

> Thanks and best regards,
> Klaus

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-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
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