ABSTRACT:

The Time Zone Database (TZDB), established in 1986, has become the primary technology for civil timekeeping conventions. It contains the complete history of the world’s civil time since 1970, and copies of it reside in most of the planet’s cell phones, computers, and similar devices.

TZDB is an example of what I’ll call “long data”: data intended to be used for a long time. And it’s an important special case of long data, as it has been developed entirely in the open with no use restrictions, and it has been copied so very widely.

Most performance issues of big data are unimportant for TZDB, as individual copies are quite small. TZDB’s main challenges come from other aspects of database design and maintenance, such as version and downstream skew, scope and format disagreements, standardization, intellectual property disputes, institutional backing, and politics. I will describe some of these challenges in TZDB’s evolution and in its likely future.

BIO:

Paul R. Eggert is a senior lecturer in the UCLA Computer Science Dept., teaching mostly in the areas of software development and programming languages. He has contributed to the Time Zone Database since 1992, and currently serves as the Internet Engineering Steering Group’s Primary Coordinator for TZDB.

Via: 3400 Boelter Hall + Zoom Webinar