Datetimes

TileDB supports datetime values for attributes and array domains. The representation used by TileDB follows the design of Numpy’s np.datetime64 datatype.

Values for the datetime types are internally stored and manipulated as int64 values. From the perspective of core TileDB internally, the datetime datatypes are simply aliases for TILEDB_INT64.

The meaning of an integral datetime value depends on three things:

A reference date. TileDB fixes this to the UNIX epoch time (1970-01-01 at 12:00 am). This is not currently configurable.
A unit of time. For example: day, month, hour, or nanosecond.
An integer value. This the integer number of time units relative to the reference date.

For example, a value of 10 for the type TILEDB_DATETIME_DAY refers to 12:00 am on 1970-01-10. A value of -18 for the type TILEDB_DATETIME_HR refers to 6:00 am on 1969-12-31, or 1969-12-31T06:00Z in ISO8601 format.

This means that each date unit of datetime is capable of representing a different range of dates at different resolutions. The following table (values taken from the Numpy np.datetime64 documentation) summarizes each date unit’s relative and absolute range:

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Last updated 10 months ago