Comment 4 for bug 1101839

It's obviously fragile, since simple clock skew can render nova-compute processes unavailable. You should not compare times from different machines in a distributed system in this way, even with NTP. You might try reading something like "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System" by Lamport, and then see how you feel about it.

SQLite does support a "now" function, but it's not spelled the same:

sqlite> create table foo(zot);
sqlite> insert into foo select datetime('now');
sqlite> insert into foo select datetime('now');
sqlite> insert into foo select datetime('now');
sqlite> select * from foo;
2013-02-26 04:04:22
2013-02-26 04:04:33
2013-02-26 04:04:34
sqlite>