I recently wrote a spider for jobs with the scrapy framework, and stored all my items in mysql.

But here the problem comes. If you try to use timestamp type in mysql, several traps may be concerned.

First, how the timestamp being interpreted is affected by your connection timezone.If you do not specify, it may use the mysql server one.But who knows what is the default one.

Second, your mysql client in python layer may not support time_zone param, which is available in mysql c api.Some libraries like MySQL-python==1.2.5 just not support it. So, if you want to change connection timezone, you may have to specify it explicitly on every sql query.

Third, your mysql database may not be controlled by you, so you would be better to change your logic code timezone.

As for me, i would just use INT for all my time related data, and represent them when necessary.

So, use it explicitly, or just don’t use it.