Firebird initially looks like an ideal base for handling dates and times, with a date element separated from a time one. The vast majority of material only requires a date with day accuracy, but while you can work with dates, these are restricted to a Gregorian calendar. Adding Julian calendar dates is not supported, and the various holes created by countries switching calendars are not supported in date comparisons. So the use of generic DATE and TIMESTAMP has to be viewed against what data is being stored. Most databases have similar restrictions their date related functions. Even TIME has problems at times when one needs to handle negative times such as time zone offsets. The use of 64 bit Unix epoch times are the fallback n many cases, but even that is not an ideal soultion.

To be continued!