[GLLUG] Is there any sane reason to do this? (Database question.)

[Martin A. Brooks]

On Tue, October 7, 2014 20:05, John Winters wrote:
> Is there a good design reason to do this?

I can sort of see why you might do this, but it's still wrong.  What
they're trying to do, I think, is provide a consistent reference date for
a set of related rows in other tables.  I would not do that in this
manner, but if I were it'd be something like:

create table dateref(
  id serial,
  d datetime with timezone default now();
);

and then use ID as a foreign key constaint for every table that needed a
date reference.   The database does the work of enforcing the integrity
and you can use things like cascading deletes to keep the whole thing
clean.