pg_timestamp ia an optional tool to skip parsing overhead of timestamp string. This is involved in a pg_bulkload package.

pg_timestamp_in

This user-defined function provides very fast loading of timestamp type data. For the speed, instead, the format of the timestamp data must satisfy the following 19byte format:

2007-01-01 12:34:56

• Year/Month/Day/Hour/Minute/Second, each must be represented using only digits (0x30 to 0x39, no month name, no AM/PM, etc.).
• Only a hyphen (0x2d) can be used (and must be used) to separate year, month and day.
• Single space (0x20) must appear between the day and the hour.
• Hour, minute and second must be separated using single colon (0x3a) respectively.
• No additional spaces and tabs are allowed.

Installation

Installation sequence is shown below. As a preliminary, the permissions of directories of PostgreSQL server should be set correctly.

$ cd [directory where postgresql-8.2or3.X.tar.gz is untared]/contrib/
$ tar zxvf pg_bulkload-2.3.X.tar.gz
$ cd pg_bulkload
$ make
$ make install
$ postgresql start
$ psql -f $PGHOME/share/contrib/pg_timestamp.sql database_name

Reminder

Timestamp value with timezone attribute is outside the scope of pg_timestamp_in. If you provide data in such format, you must use usual PostgreSQL feature to read data. In this case, you may need longer duration to load. Although pg_timestamp_in provide much faster data loading for timestamp data, it replaces usual PostgreSQL's internal function used to read timestamp data. That is, use of pg_timestamp_in influences the data symtax for PostgreSQL's SQL statements such as INSERT, COPY, and UPDATE. To avoid such influence, users have to use pg_timestamp_in only in the data loading, and uninstall pg_timestamp_in.