What is the best way to handle timestamps in database driven websites?
time stamps can be tricky in some ways to deal with. My company stores this information as a numeric value only. The time and date are 2 separate fields in the databases. The date is always stored in numeric as YYYYMMDD……This, for sorting purposes, doesn’t require any trickery with date objects or translations as numbers will naturally sort correctly. The time is always stored as 24 hour time and is HHMM. Again, as a numeric, the values naturally sort correctly. I have dealt with actual date/time stamps and do not prefer them as numerics are always easier to deal with. If you require precision of time and date, then the timestamps are the best solution as it defines down to the fraction of a second…..which is necessary for a busy site.
