This package provides a drop-in replacement of SQLAlchemy's built-in DateTime
type with timezone=True option enabled. Although SQLAlchemy's built-in
DateTime type provides timezone=True option, since some vendors like
SQLite and MySQL don't provide timestamptz data type, the option doesn't
make any effect on these vendors.
UtcDateTime type is equivalent to the built-in DateTime with
timezone=True option enabled on vendors that support timestamptz
e.g. PostgreSQL, but on SQLite or MySQL, it shifts all datetime.datetime
values to UTC offset before store them, and returns always aware
datetime.datetime values through result sets.
Long story short, UtcDateTime does:
- take only aware
datetime.datetime, - return only aware
datetime.datetime, - never take or return naive
datetime.datetime, - ensure timestamps in database always to be encoded in UTC, and
- work as you'd expect.
A SQLAlchemy helper function, utcnow(), is provided as an alternative
to func.now() for generating UtcDateTime values on the server. For
example: Column('time', UtcDateTime(), default=utcnow()).
Written by Hong Minhee at Spoqa, and distributed under MIT license.