From: ljb <ljb220@mindspring.com>
Subject: Re: What is the binary format for timestamps?
Date: Fri, 8 Apr 2005 01:02:07 +0000 (UTC)
Organization: Hub.Org Networking Services
Lines: 18
Message-ID: <d34l6e$284h$1@news.hub.org>
References: <4255A00F.1010409@innovision.com>
User-Agent: slrn/0.9.8.1 (Linux)
To: pgsql-interfaces@postgresql.org

marvin.bellamy@innovision.com wrote:
> I'm trying to read/write timestamps as binary data, but I'm getting 
> garbage.  It looks like there are 8 bytes of timestamp data (if I read 
> the headers correctly), which I had assumed was the time in millis from 
> the PostgreSQL epoch, but my values are way off.  I wrote what I thought 
> was valid data to my  timestamp columns, but my queries in the psql 
> console show (epoch?) for each one.  When I read the binary content 
> back, I'd expect to get 0s, but I get some non-zero values.

Don't use binary formats. But if you do:

A date is returned as a 4-byte big-endian integer representing the number
of days since POSTGRES_EPOCH_DATE.
A timestamp is returned as an 8-byte big-endian double precision number of
seconds since POSTGRES_EPOCH_DATE.
A time is returned as an 8-byte big-endian double precision number of
seconds since midnight.
POSTGRES_EPOCH_DATE is January 1, 2000 (2000-01-01).