I am planning on starting a project that will need to record timestamps of incoming transactions. I appreciate that Unix Time is an integer value and I can use this type of functionality to my advantage. However, Unix Time only measures in seconds. As a minimal requirement I need to record transaction times at the millisecond level.
I know that there are ways that I could get around this issue, but I was wondering if there was another standardized way of representing time data that also represented milliseconds (or, some factor of sub-milliseconds) in the time value that is fully expressed as an integer value since epoch.
Does such a time format exist? FYI, so long as the date data-type is standardized, I don't care what system this is native in. I can code my own implementation, however, I would like to use an existing date/time format, rather than create my own.
One place where such a standard is used is ECMAScript / Javascript. Javascript date objects use milliseconds since January 1, 1970, midnight UTC for their numerical integer representation. This is detailed here.
You can test this using your browser's console:
var d = new Date();
console.log(d.getTime()); // yields integer milliseconds since epoch
So yes, there is prior art for such a use.