Also because you shouldn't be passing dates as strings to the database
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The problem with epoch + counter is that it can become inaccurate for dates in the future. If I were designing something that had to store time, I'd personally structure it as (i64 for days, i64 for nanos) -- or (i32 for days, i32 for micros) if space was that big of a concern
"days" and "subsecond thingy" being offsets from an epoch of course. You need days to be separate in order to represent dates in the future accurately though