Legacy and New Timestamp

New TIMESTAMP and TIME semantics align the types with the SQL standard. See the following sections for details.

Note

The new TIMESTAMP semantics is still experimental. It’s recommended to keep the legacy TIMESTAMP semantics enabled. You can experiment with the new semantics by configuring it globally or on a per-session basis. The legacy semantics may be deprecated in a future release.

Configuration

The legacy semantics can be enabled using the deprecated.legacy-timestamp config property. Setting it to true (the default) enables the legacy semantics, whereas setting it to false enables the new semantics.

Additionally, it can be enabled or disabled on a per-session basis with the legacy_timestamp session property.

TIMESTAMP semantic changes

Previously, the TIMESTAMP type described an instance in time in the openLooKeng session’s time zone. Now, openLooKeng treats TIMESTAMP values as a set of the following fields representing wall time:

  • YEAR OF ERA
  • MONTH OF YEAR
  • DAY OF MONTH
  • HOUR OF DAY
  • MINUTE OF HOUR
  • SECOND OF MINUTE - as DECIMAL(5, 3)

For that reason, a TIMESTAMP value is not linked with the session time zone in any way until a time zone is needed explicitly, such as when casting to a TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE or TIME WITH TIME ZONE. In those cases, the time zone offset of the session time zone is applied, as specified in the SQL standard.

TIME semantic changes

The TIME type was changed similarly to the TIMESTAMP type.

TIME WITH TIME ZONE semantic changes

Due to compatibility requirements, having TIME WITH TIME ZONE completely aligned with the SQL standard was not possible yet. For that reason, when calculating the time zone offset for TIME WITH TIME ZONE, openLooKeng uses the session’s start date and time.

This can be seen in queries using TIME WITH TIME ZONE in a time zone that has had time zone policy changes or uses DST. For example, with a session start time of 2017-03-01:

  • Query: SELECT TIME '10:00:00 Asia/Kathmandu' AT TIME ZONE 'UTC'
  • Legacy result: 04:30:00.000 UTC
  • New result: 04:15:00.000 UTC