Re: Handling multiple timezones

"Steven P. Crain" <scrain_at_shore.net> wrote:
>Does anyone have experience using Sybase with multiple Time zones?
 

>Our database is running using US/Eastern timezone. I have data I need to
>load in that comes with the times all GMT. I can't just use dateadd to
>offset from GMT to US/Eastern because US/Eastern changes between EST and
>EDT twice a year.
 

>Has anyone found an elegant & efficient way to handle this problem in
>Sybase. It seems to me that Sybase internationalization code really ought
>to do time zone conversions for you, but it doesn't.
>(Running Sybase 11.5.)

It seems to me that Sybase should do like Unix does, and internally store (and compare) all datetimes (Unix time_t's) in GMT time, and allow the local server's timezone to control display formatting (eg, getdate()). I known Sybase doesn't int time_t's for datetime, but the idea is the same.
One suggestion I've received is to store the TZ offset yourself, in a smallint. Or, perhaps a single, server-wide table, with one row, containing the current server TZ?
Both of these solutions are gross hacks, IMHO.

There must be some folks out there who aggregate (replicate) local London, New York, and Tokyo tables to a corp HQ. How do you keep track of the different "real" times involved.

Also, crossposted to Oracle -- how does Oracle do it?

thanks,
--wade Received on Sun May 24 1998 - 00:00:00 CDT