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Today's Topics:
1. Database available in other formats (Sergio Bonfiglio)
2. Re: Database available in other formats (Paul Eggert)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2020 17:12:55 +0200
From: Sergio Bonfiglio <bonfiglio.sergio@gmail.com>
To: tz@iana.org
Subject: [tz] Database available in other formats
Message-ID:
<CANCwfxiVBnHPUawqZxWEKU+W89PWxL0SNRUXAMLgX1iMTMUF7Q@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Dear Sirs,
First thig first a big THANK YOU for your invaluable work.
I was overwhelmed by the complexity of your database, because it requires
also external pieces of code to be safely read.
I was wondering if does exist the database in different formats that may be
larger but more readable and easy usable.
An SQL database could be really "for everyone", because can be queried by
everything from everywhere by any language.
If I may make a humble suggestion, a JD date in floating format that equips
any record with the initial and final date of the rule/event could be of
great help.
With a single query, one could recall all the records that pertain a
certain moment in time also with different and overlapping rules.
Thanks for any reply and thank for your work that is making me sweat the
classical " seven shirts".
Stay well
Sergio Bonfiglio
ITALY
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Message: 2
Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2020 13:39:06 -0700
From: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
To: Sergio Bonfiglio <bonfiglio.sergio@gmail.com>
Cc: Time zone mailing list <tz@iana.org>
Subject: Re: [tz] Database available in other formats
Message-ID: <cb75d7d3-878d-5a5d-2a3a-69e54ef2583e@cs.ucla.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
On 4/28/20 8:12 AM, Sergio Bonfiglio wrote:
> I was overwhelmed by the complexity of your database, because it requires
> also external pieces of code to be safely read.
Yes, it's in its own .zi format. Typically I edit it with a text editor so I
suppose that counts as an external piece of code. Most people either do that, or
process it with the code supplied as part of tzdb, or use one of the
already-written tz compilers
<https://data.iana.org/time-zones/tz-link.html#compilers>. Perhaps one of those
will work for you.
> An SQL database could be really "for everyone", because can be queried by
> everything from everywhere by any language.
MariaDB, MySQL, and Oracle Database use tzdb in some form; perhaps they're
already doing something along the lines of what you're asking for.
> If I may make a humble suggestion, a JD date in floating format that equips
> any record with the initial and final date of the rule/event could be of
> great help.
JD should be relatively easy to generate automatically from the existing format.
I doubt whether the source data should have JD directly, though, as JD is
inconvenient for humans and anyway the .zi format is now read by so many
programs that any changes to it would need to be carefully considered and
justified. But JD could be good for database queries, along the lines of your
suggestion.
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End of tz Digest, Vol 104, Issue 1
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