The perl time function is used for the determination for how many seconds have passed since a certain date (most commonly Jan 1st 1970) you can find various methods online to determine this as well as other things such as checking of a leap year, determining the day and many more.
This question is very nearly meaningless. Perl is a programming language; the reliability of any given Perl program depends on the talent and insight of the programmer.
For Microsoft SQL Server there are no numeric values that consume 3 bytes. The numeric data types, their value range, and byte consumption as we follows:
Data type
Range
Storage
bigint
-2^63 (-9,223,372,036,854,775,808) to 2^63-1 (9,223,372,036,854,775,807)
8 Bytes
int
-2^31 (-2,147,483,648) to 2^31-1 (2,147,483,647)
4 Bytes
smallint
-2^15 (-32,768) to 2^15-1 (32,767)
2 Bytes
tinyint
0 to 255
1 Byte