[GNC] Working with dates in Postgresql DB

Wed Apr 29 13:13:12 EDT 2020

 Hi John!

You are here finally!

Waiting for you all the day :)

All my data I have entered inside Gnucash 3.7,    Ubuntu. No imports! Scheduled are ok!

Just simple invoices inside the program!

The SQL type conversions inside Postgres give better results with 22:00 but 21:00 show the same date again even in April - summer time where is for example 2018-06-04 21:00:00+03.

22:00+02 is 00:00 of the next day, 21:00+03 (summer time) is 00:00 of the next day but conversion does not work...

So, maybe you could try this SQL to check your records and revise the procedure which posts the data to DB?

Thank you,

Dimon.

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> On Apr 29, 2020 at 19:50,  <John Ralls (mailto:jralls at ceridwen.us)>  wrote:
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>   >  On Apr 29, 2020, at 2:18 AM, finfort at gmail.com wrote:  >   >  Dear John,  >   >  Thank you for your response.  >   >   >  I have collected some statistics from my DB.  >   >  My DB has 1724 records - transactions.  >   >  This is my SQL query, it is pretty simple and shows all the combinations of times in posted_date timestamps in transactions table, number of repetitions for that time value, min enter_date, max enter_date:  >   >  SELECT  >  t.post_date::TIME as "POST TIME",  >  COUNT(t.post_date::TIME) as "REPS",  >  min(t.enter_date) as "MIN ENTER DATE",  >  max(t.enter_date) as "MAX ENTER DATE"  >  FROM transactions t  >  GROUP BY t.post_date::TIME  >  ORDER BY t.post_date::TIME  >   >  Here are the results:  >   >  ----  >   >  POST TIME REPS MIN ENTER DATE MAX ENTER DATE  >   >  "00:00:00" 18 "2020-01-26 18:07:14" "2020-01-28 19:11:07"  >  "10:59:00" 1177 "2019-12-23 17:55:29" "2020-04-23 11:24:24"  >  "21:00:00" 251 "2020-01-08 17:43:54" "2020-04-23 10:36:33"  >  "22:00
:00" 256 "2020-01-08 17:06:59" "2020-04-23 11:24:08"  >  "23:00:00" 22 "2020-01-27 19:16:04" "2020-01-28 19:39:49"  >   >  ----  >   >  I live in Cyprus, here is UTC +2 and summer time UTC +3, as I know.  >   >  I started to study Gnucash in December 2019 and have entered my data of 2016-2020.  >   >  I never changed my place and time zone in the period of working with Gnucash.  >   >   >  1. Most of the records have time in date_posted 10:59:00 for all the period of data entering.  >   >  2. Only 2 days of entering have the results of 00:00:00 - 18 records.  >   >  3. Only 2 days of entering have the results of 23:00:00 - 22 records.  >   >  4. 21:00:00 and 22:00:00 - 500+ records - 30% of transactions for all the period of data entering.  >   >   >  Can you please explain that?  >   >  Why I have so many different time stamps? When and why the system decides to write time different from 10:59:00?  >   >  I understand that the system writes real ENTERING date and time and it is reas
onable to use the time zone somehow.  >   >  When I POST the document with exact date in it I suppose to see this POST DATE the same wherever in Cyprus or UK or USA. But entering the same date I can have 5 different results. How it works and what is the reason - I have no idea...  >   >  Maybe you can give some examples and the algorithm to convert these dates? Where else I have to convert dates? As those are all posted dates you've found a bug or two as posted date should always have a 10:59:00 timestamp. The 21:00 and 22:00 times are clearly midnight local, and which one is used *should* be determined by whether DST is in effect for the posted date in your locale. It seems that 40 transactions somehow used UK time instead of Cypress time. Did you enter all of the transactions from the GnuCash UI or did you import some of them? If you imported some is there any way to tell which were imported (and from where and by what method), perhaps by the accounts their splits are in or because
 you still have some of the import files? Were any of them created by scheduled transactions? Regards, John Ralls 
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