Oldest Recorded Transaction

Oldest recorded transaction The other day I posted a tweet with this image which I thought was funny: This is the oldest transaction database from 3100 BC - recording accounts of malt and barley groats. Considering this thing survived 5000 years (holy shit!) with zero downtime and has stronger durability guarantees than most databases today. I call it rock solid durability. This got me thinking, can I insert this date in today’s database? What is the oldest timestamp a database can support? So I checked the top three databases: MySQL, Postgres, and SQLite: MySQL 1000 AD Postgres 4713 BC SQLite 4713 BC Too bad you cannot use MySQL for this. Postgres and SQLite support the Julian calendar and the lowest date is Jan 01, 4713 BC: sales =# INSERT INTO orders VALUES ( '4713-01-01 BC' ::date); INSERT 0 1 sales =# SELECT * FROM orders; timestamp --------------- 4713 - 01 - 01 BC ( 1 row ) sales =# INSERT INTO orders VALUES ( '4714-01-01 BC' ::date); ERROR: date out of range: "4714-01-01 BC" I wonder how people store dates older than this. Maybe if I’m a British Museum manager, and I want to keep theft inventory details. How do I do it? As an epoch? Store it as text? Use some custom system? How do I get it to support all the custom operations that a typical TIMESTAMP supports? Thanks to aku, happy_shady, Mr. Bhat, and General Bruh for reading an early draft of this post.