What Is Epoch?
The epoch is the reference point for Unix time, starting at midnight UTC on January 1, 1970. PostgreSQL can convert timestamps to and from epoch time for easier time calculations. It's useful for working with APIs or time-based math.
Why It Matters for PostgreSQL Performance
In PostgreSQL performance work, Epoch affects throughput, latency, or operational reliability depending on workload and configuration.
Practical Benchmarking Context
When benchmarking with pgbench, track how Epoch changes behavior across scale factor, client concurrency, and storage conditions.
Use this term together with workload shape, concurrency level, and scale factor when interpreting pgbench outputs. Isolated values can be misleading without full run context.
Example
Example: SELECT EXTRACT(EPOCH FROM now());