Dates and time

Added in version 1.0.0

datatable has several builtin types to support working with date/time variables.

date32

The date32 type is used to represent a particular calendar date without a time component. Internally, this type is stored as a 32-bit integer containing the number of days since the epoch (Jan 1, 1970). Thus, this type accommodates dates within the range of approximately ±5.8 million years.

The calendar used for this type is proleptic Gregorian, meaning that it extends the modern-day Gregorian calendar into the past before this calendar was first adopted.

time64

The time64 type is used to represent a specific moment in time. This corresponds to datetime in Python, or timestamp in Arrow or pandas. Internally, this type is stored as a 64-bit integer containing the number of milliseconds since the epoch (Jan 1, 1970) in UTC.

This type is not leap-seconds aware, meaning that it assumes that each day has exactly 24×3600 seconds. In practice it means that calculating time difference between two time64 moments may be off by the number of leap seconds that have occurred between them.

A time64 column may also carry a time zone as meta information. This time zone is used to convert the timestamp from the absolute UTC time to the local calendar. For example, suppose you have two time64 columns: one is in UTC while the other is in America/Los_Angeles time zone. Assume both columns store the same value 1577836800000. Then these two columns represent the same moment in time, however their calendar representations are different: 2020-01-01T00:00:00Z and 2019-12-31T16:00:00-0800 respectively.