pg_timestamp

pg_timestamp ia an optional tool to skip parsing overhead of timestamp string. This is involved in a pg_bulkload package.

pg_timestamp_in

This user-defined function provides very fast loading of timestamp type data. For the speed, instead, the format of the timestamp data must satisfy the following 19byte format:

2007-01-01 12:34:56

Year/Month/Day/Hour/Minute/Second, each must be represented using only digits (0x30 to 0x39, no month name, no AM/PM, etc.).
Only a hyphen (0x2d) can be used (and must be used) to separate year, month and day.
Single space (0x20) must appear between the day and the hour.
Hour, minute and second must be separated using single colon (0x3a) respectively.
No additional spaces and tabs are allowed.

Installation

Installation sequence is shown below. As a preliminary, the permissions of directories of PostgreSQL server should be set correctly.


$ cd [directory where postgresql-8.2or3.X.tar.gz is untared]/contrib/
$ tar zxvf pg_bulkload-2.3.X.tar.gz
$ cd pg_bulkload
$ make
$ make install
$ postgresql start
$ psql -f $PGHOME/share/contrib/pg_timestamp.sql database_name

Reminder

Timestamp value with timezone attribute is outside the scope of pg_timestamp_in. If you provide data in such format, you must use usual PostgreSQL feature to read data. In this case, you may need longer duration to load. Although pg_timestamp_in provide much faster data loading for timestamp data, it replaces usual PostgreSQL's internal function used to read timestamp data. That is, use of pg_timestamp_in influences the data symtax for PostgreSQL's SQL statements such as INSERT, COPY, and UPDATE. To avoid such influence, users have to use pg_timestamp_in only in the data loading, and uninstall pg_timestamp_in.