use Perl

• When? now()! (Score:1)

  by chromatic (983)

  Why the hell would I want to have "DEFAULT NULL" treated as "DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP"?

  Because I certainly don't believe that all of my middleware has the exact same time, and I want a single canonical reference for the time I added a row to the database.

  Maybe I'm too lazy always to include now() every time I insert a row into the table, and I'm definitely too lazy to write a stored procedure to insert the row or a trigger to set those values, but the fewer magical things the middleware has to do and
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by clscott (4354)

    I can't say you've provided a convincing argument for why a DEFAULT NULL gets current timestamp or 0 depending on it's position.
    
    If the the designer has said they want an empty timestamp to default to NULL, the value should be NULL, not whatever the database decides to do with it.
    
    What if my first timestamp column in a table represents the date that I shipped an order to a customer and the second represents the date it was ordered? If I haven't shipped it to the customer yet ... ? That's one heck of an odd im
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by chromatic (983)

      I can't say you've provided a convincing argument for why a DEFAULT NULL gets current timestamp or 0 depending on it's position.

      True. Likewise, I didn't provide a convincing argument why butterscotch is disgusting, but at least I can defend that position.
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by Aristotle (5147)

    Yes, that is a good argument showing that it makes perfect sense to use DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP.

    However, am I missing something, or did you fail to even notice that the point in question is about DEFAULT NULL (which is being treated the same as DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP for some bizarre reason (except when it’s not))?
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by chromatic (983)

      However, am I missing something, or did you fail to even notice that the point in question is about DEFAULT NULL...

      You're right; I did fail to notice that. Somehow I turned it around in my head so that it meant "When you insert no value into this column," which is completely different.
• hysterical raisins (Score:1)

  by kag (4257)

  The ability to specify a useful default for timestamp columns is newish. The old behavior was to treat the first timestamp column with DEFAULT NULL as what can now be expressed as DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP. If you didn't like it, you used datetime as the column type instead of timestamp.
  
• death to timestamps (Score:1)

  by rjbs (4671)

  Yeah, I've worked with a big pile of MySQL-based software that uses timestamps instead of date times all over the place, and then does crazier things. The first timestamp, for example, is used as a last modification time, except it's displayed to the users as something more like a created/modified-in-certain-way time, meaning that if you modify other fields, you have to modify that one to explicily /not/ change.
  
  Sure, it's a sign of programmer failure, but it's yet another case where MySQL makes easy things

  --
  rjbs