PostgreSQL/JDBC and TIMESTAMP vs. TIMESTAMPTZ

Question

I\'ve been going through a lot of pain dealing with Timestamps lately with JPA. I have found that a lot of my issues have been cleared up by using TIMESTAMPTZ for my fields inst

Answer 1

You could use it to represent what Joda-Time and the new Java 8 time APIs call a LocalDateTime. A LocalDateTime doesn't represent a precise point on the timeline. It's just a set of fields, from year to nanoseconds. It is "a description of the date, as used for birthdays, combined with the local time as seen on a wall clock".

You could use it to represent, for example, the fact that your precise birth date is 1975-07-19 at 6 PM. Or that, all across the world, the next new year is celebrated on 2015-01-01 at 00:00.

To represent precise moments, like the moment Armstrong walked on the moon, a timestamp with timezone is indeed more appropriate. Regardless of the timezone of the JVM and the timezone of the database, it should return you the correct moment.