What are datetimes?
You probably already understand that in the computer memory, all numeric information is represented as ones and zeros, so at the most basic level, there isn't anything special about dates or times. However, when working with real data in business and technical projects, we tend to think about time or dates in their own units, differently from other numbers. Time is most often thought of as hours, minutes, or seconds, and dates are usually years, months, and days. Other common patterns are the weekdays, day of the week, business days, and quarters. We often group data into bins of days, weeks, months, or quarters. Within these bins, there might be data every second, minute, hour, or on some other or even random period. Because it is natural to think of dates and time of day together, Python in general, and pandas in particular, provides objects to make it easy to work this way. The most fundamental time component in pandas is Timestamp
, and it is equivalent...