Re: Why is ODBC so difficult?

Jeff Woods ( jeff@delta.com )
Sun, 01 Mar 1998 12:00:30 -0500

At 03:26 AM 3/1/98 -0800, you wrote:

>The highest date currently supported in 2038. Anything higher will
>return an Expired Account.

Folks, just in case you're wondering how such an "odd" date was chosen...

Many systems store dates in the format "seconds since January 1, 1970,
12:00:00 midnight". They store this in a long integer, able to store a
number of approximately 2.1 billion. There are 28.536 million seconds in
a year. Thus, there are roughly 2.1 billion seconds between January 1,
1970 and some date in the middle of the year 2039.

(IMO, the designer of this system was stupid, and I'm not referring to
Dale, I'm referring to the inventor of "seconds since" format -- it's an
unneeded calculation to figure out leap years, seconds per day, hour, etc,
and should have been unsigned, to extend it slightly into 2100 in ANY case,
but that's what format the underlying code of Emerald or SQL uses, and
that's what Dale had to use... There's be another round of "are you year
2039 compliant" issues by then, I'm sure.)