Support Elixir durations

[josevalim]

Elixir version

1.17.0

Database and Version

Any

Postgrex Version

Not yet supported

Current behavior

Postgrex.Duration is not supported.

Expected behavior

We should support the new durations and potentially deprecate Postgrex.Duration.

[greg-rychlewski]

For now were you just looking to encode Elixir durations? And then when we require 1.17 we can do the decoding/replace Postgrex.Duration?

[josevalim]

I think that's a good beginning, yeah! We could maybe already even allow defaulting to them via an option?

[josevalim]

This is in but we want to keep it around and eventually make it the default.

[endoooo]

after adjusting the config following the documentation (thanks to the tips in #706 and this Elixir Forum topic) everything was apparently working just fine.

I said apparently because while preparing a release, I noticed a strange behavior:

inspect in UI	query in DB

the DB interval is not matching the Duration in the application.

maybe this is somehow related to the notes described here?

---

relevant code

# config
config :my_app, MyApp.Repo, types: MyApp.PostgrexTypes

# my_app/postgrex_types.ex
Postgrex.Types.define(MyApp.PostgrexTypes, Ecto.Adapters.Postgres.extensions(),
  interval_decode_type: Duration
)

# migration
alter table(:table_name) do
  #...
  add :duration, :duration,
    generated: """
      ALWAYS AS (CASE
        WHEN closed_at IS NOT NULL THEN closed_at - inserted_at
        ELSE NULL
      END) STORED
    """
  #...
end

# schema
schema "students_records" do
  #...
  field :duration_until_close, :duration, read_after_writes: true
  #...
end

---

ps: sorry if this is not the right place to post it.

ps2: if someone can hint me with a starting point, I can try to investigate it and contribute with a PR (although, as a designer, my dev skills are limited haha)

[greg-rychlewski]

Thanks @endoooo.

So the issue is that no matter how you insert the duration into Postgres, it will translate it internally into months, days, and microseconds. And that is how you will get the data back out of the database as well.

Given this, the current behaviour is not necessarily a bug but rather one representation choice out of many possible ones. The ones I can think of:

• give the same units Postgres stores (months, days and microseconds) but then this won't be the same as the previous data type, Postgrex.Interval. we probably want some consistency between the two
• make it exactly the same units as Postgrex.Interval (months, days, seconds, microseconds)
• the current behaviour, which is try to fill the largest units first

I can see arguments for all 3....I don't think there is necessarily a clear cut answer. Given Postgrex.Interval has stood for quite a long time that was why I chose to basically do the same thing.

But let's see what @josevalim thinks.

[greg-rychlewski]

Maybe the best compromise is this

make it exactly the same units as Postgrex.Interval (months, days, seconds, microseconds)

[josevalim]

Yes, I think mirroring Postgrex.Interval is a good point 👍, and I also think that's the closest representation we can have to PostgreSQL itself, so we get 1 and 2.

[endoooo]

ahhhh... now I get it. thank you for the clarification @greg-rychlewski ! I knew it was some misconception on my part 😅

I was ready to create a PR with @josevalim suggestion, but I noticed you've already done this hehe

thank you guys!

[Xunjin]

Sorry to hijack this issue, shouldn't Duration and Postgrex Interval type support the idea of infinity and -infinity as this is available at Postgres 17+

[benediktms]

I want to echo what @Xunjin said. infinity should be a supported value, since it's a supported value in Postgres.