I’m have access to a 3rd party application’s database, and I see a field called “date” which stores date/time values as floating point numbers, but I’m not sure how this floating point number is mapped to a date/time. There is no documentation for this database.
Here is some sample data:
date-field actual-date-time
253507382.168744 1/12/09 6:43 PM PST
253507480.136126 1/12/09 6:44 PM PST
253508091.838982 1/12/09 6:54 PM PST
256703604.015055 2/18/09 6:33 PM PST
256704413.484674 2/18/09 6:46 PM PST
Note: I had to enter these values manually so there’s a slight chance they may be off a bit. If you would like to see more data, let me know and I’ll add more.
I’m hoping someone is familiar with storing dates in this format and can let me know how to get a date/time given a floating point number.
If you look at the change in the numbers over the 10 and 13 minute intervals, you’ll see that it’s about 60. Therefore I conclude that it’s a count of the number of seconds from a base date.
I think the base date is 1/1/2000 or 1/1/2001.
Edit: The base date appears to be 1/1/2001, and the time appears to be adjusted as well – it’s probably UTC with your local time offset added.