For the specific example you used on your question (year 1200), technically things will work.
In general, however, timestamps are unadvisable for this uses.
First, the range limitation is arbitrary: in MySQL it’s Jan 1st, 1000. If you are working with 12-13th century stuff, things go fine… but if at some moment you need to add something older (10th century or earlier), the date will miserably break, and fixing the issue will require re-formatting all your historic dates into something more adequate.
Timestamps are normally represented as raw integers, with a given “tick interval” and “epoch point”, so the number is indeed the number of ticks elapsed since the epoch to the represented date (or viceversa for negative dates). This means that, as with any fixed-with integer data-type, the set of representable values is finite. Most timestamp formats I know about sacrifice range in favor of precision, mostly because applications that need to perform time arithmetic often need to do so with a decent precision; while applications that need to work with historical dates very rarely need to perform serious arithmetic.
In other words, timestamps are meant for precise representation of dates. Second (or even fraction of second) precission makes no sense for historical dates: could you tell me, down to the milliseconds, when was Henry the 8th crowned as King of England?
In the case of MySQL, the format is inherently defined as “4-digit years”, so any related optimization can rely on the assumption that the year will have 4 digits, or that the entire string will have exactly 10 chars (“yyyy-mm-dd”), etc. It’s just a matter of luck that the date you mentioned on your title still fits, but even relying on that is still dangerous: besides what the DB itself can store, you need to be aware of what the rest of your server stack can manipulate. For example, if you are using PHP to interact with your database, trying to handle historical dates is very likely to crash at some point or another (on a 32-bit environment, the range for UNIX-style timestamps is December 13, 1901 through January 19, 2038).
In summary: MySQL will store properly any date with a 4-digit year; but in general using timestamps for historical dates is almost guaranteed to trigger issues and headaches more often than not. I strongly advise against such usage.
Hope this helps.
Edit/addition:
Thank you for this very insteresting
answer. Should I create my own algo
for historical date or choose another
db but which one ? – user284523
I don’t think any DB has too much support for this kind of dates: applications using it most often have enough with string-/text- representation. Actually, for dates on year 1 and later, a textual representation will even yield correct sorting / comparisons (as long as the date is represented by order of magnitude: y,m,d order). Comparisons will break, however, if “negative” dates are also involved (they would still compare as earlier than any positive one, but comparing two negative dates would yield a reversed result).
If you only need Year 1 and later dates, or if you don’t need sorting, then you can make your life a lot easier by using strings.
Otherwise, the best approach is to use some kind of number, and define your own “tick interval” and “epoch point”. A good interval could be days (unless you really need further precission, but even then you can rely on “real” (floating-point) numbers instead of integers); and a reasonable epoch could be Jan 1, 1. The main problem will be turning these values to their text representation, and viceversa. You need to keep in mind the following details:
- Leap years have one extra day.
- The rule for leap years was “any multiple of 4” until 1582, when it changed from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar and became “multiple of 4 except those that are multiples of 100 unless they are also multiples of 400”.
- The last day of the Julian calendar was Oct 4th, 1582. The next day, first of the Gregorian calendar, was Oct 15th, 1582. 10 days were skipped to make the new calendar match again with the seasons.
- As stated in the comments, the two rules above vary by country: Papal states and some catholic countries did adopt the new calendar on the stated dates, but many other countries took longer to do so (the last being Turkey in 1926). This means that any date between the papal bull in 1582 and the last adoption in 1926 will be ambiguous without geographical context, and even more complex to process.
- There is no “year 0”: the year before year 1 was year -1, or year 1 BCE.
All of this requires quite elaborate parser and formater functions, but beyond the many case-by-case breakings there isn’t really too much complexity (it’d be tedious to code, but quite straight-forward). The use of numbers as the underlying representation ensures correct sorting/comparing for any pair of values.
Knowing this, now it’s your choice to take the approach that better fits your needs.