29.4. Julian Dates
All SQL implementations support a DATE data type, but there is no standard defining how they should implement it internally. Some products represent the year, month, and day as parts of a double-word integer; others use Julianized dates; some use ISO ordinal dates; and some store dates as character strings. The programmer does not care as long as the dates work correctly.
There is a technical difference between a Julian date and a Julianized date. A Julian date is an astronomer’s term that counts the number of days since January 1, 4713 B.C.E. This count is now well over 2 billion; only astronomers use it. However, computer companies have corrupted the term to mean a count from some point in time from which they can build ...
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