[Sqlalchemy-tickets] Issue #4307: roadmap request: infinite date handling (postgres, others?) (zzzeek/sqlalchemy)

[jvanasco <iss...@bi...>]

New issue 4307: roadmap request: infinite date handling (postgres, others?)
https://bitbucket.org/zzzeek/sqlalchemy/issues/4307/roadmap-request-infinite-date-handling

jvanasco:

PostgresSQL has two special datetimes:

   UPDATE foo SET datetime_column = '-inifinity';
   UPDATE foo SET datetime_column = 'inifinity';

SqlAlchemy doesn't natively support these because the underlying engines may or may not support them.  Psycopg2, for example, converts it to a Julian calendar maxdate/mindate UNLESS a special adapter is registered -- but then decoding it from the database is janky and this is also at the cost of supporting 'datetime.maxdate'.

It would be nice if SqlAlchemy could support this and figure out a way to standardize this across PostgreSQL drivers. 

I am not sure which other databases support this "infinity" concept.

This would obviously require a lot of research and planning across all the supported drivers for a seldom used feature, and would require the help of numerous people familiar with each driver.  I do not expect this to happen for a number of years, if ever, but wanted to log this.