On Mon, 2007-05-14 at 12:23 +0000, Tam O'Shanter wrote:
> Hello,
> I have an application reading an Informix table with a column of
> 'event_time' stored as a smallint.
>
> This is causing me some grief as I am seeing time like '895' or '465'.
>
> Not seen this method of storing time data before, is this commonplace?

No, this shouldn't be commonplace, since Informix has a DATETIME type.

> Thoughts on how to decode this data into meaningful times?

If you can't divine what the existing application does, educated
guessing might help. There are 1440 minutes in a day, which translates
to 86400 seconds in a day. Both examples are less than 1440, and 86400
exceeds the maximum that a smallint can't contain, so I'm guessing the
time is stored as "minutes since midnight".

Hope this helps,

--
Carsten Haese
http://informixdb.sourceforge.net