This page answers a question I was thinking about in the shower this morning: what is the latest date (as a UNIX timestamp) you can store in a regular postgres integer column, which has a max value of 2147483647 per the postgres docs. It turns out that the answer is January 19 2038 03:14:07 GMT.

I'm working on a project that involves sync, and we're keeping track of action numbers by incrementing the last action number, but for various reasons I was thinking, "what if we replaced the action_number field with the corresponding timestamp integer?"

Then I began to ponder which integer format to use -- if I could get a way with just postgres integer, or if I needed to stop up to bigint. It turns out I should probably step up to bigint if I do this :-)

Anyway, I could've just done this in ruby, but by the time I saw this I had forgotten I was thinking about it, and this reminded me.