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Right but by that metric Oracle is archaic. Just look at Postgres[0] supported column data types and then look at Oracle[1]. Better data types means more tightly defined columns, which means fewer bugs/less defensive programming/reduced maintenance/reduced code complexity. No doubt someone will be along shortly to tell me "you don't NEED it!" and then tell me how to hack constraints into making it act like something…
You should store dates with timezone or you can't make calculations like how old is this post. You could base it off system time, but then the calculation have to take into account summer/winter time.
For example, in a lot of countries, Labor Day is on May 1, Christmas on Dec 25. These do not happen at a certain time, and there is no timezone to be associated with these events.
If I'm requesting some user's birthday, I'm going to store it as a date. I don't have a time component. I don't know the time zone. In some cases, dates are just dates ...