Hi

I am trying to find a sustainable approach to using the "timestamp" data type.
The functions that use the timestamp type generally seem to support 64-bit values, but the actual value for the timestamp type is stored as a 32-bit value and therefore does not support timestamps after 2038-01-19 03:14:07 UTC.
And while 2038 may sound like the distant future, we are now closer to 2038 than "the year of the Ice Bucket Challenge" in 2014, so I feel it is about time to address this issue.

My problem is: I can find several posts on various forums about how to work around this issue, but I cannot find any official documentation from MySQL about what the plan is for this data type. Do they intend to upgrade the type to support 64-bit? Do they intend to deprecate the type? Or do they simply intend to mention it in passing in some release note 10 years from now?
(if anyone can point me to something I have overlooked, I would be very interested).

I fully understand that there are several ways to solve the problem (personally, I just use bigint and convert with unix_timestamp() and from_unixtime()), but I am missing an official statement on how MySQL intends to handle this issue.

Anyone who can help me out?

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The future of the timestamp data type

August 14, 2026 02:54AM