Re: sysdate, Time Zones and GMT

From: Paul Eggert <eggert_at_twinsun.com>
Date: 1995/06/26
Message-ID: <3snj4o$cmd_at_shade.twinsun.com>#1/1


drolfe_at_Eng.Sun.COM (David Rolfe) writes:

>Your function could use a table in the format

> TZ_NAME varchar2(3) NOT NULL /* Time zone name, Primary key */
> TZ_DELTA number(2) NOT NULL /* Offset from GMT, between -23.5 and +23.5 */

Bad idea. There's no standard for time zone names; `EST' means something quite different in the US than it does in Australia. In Australia `EST' has different meanings in different parts of the year, and interpretation also depends on which province you're in (at least this year, anyway -- next year they'll change the rules again).

If you care about time zones, store UTC (GMT) in the database, and convert to and from local time in the application. Anything else leads to madness. Received on Mon Jun 26 1995 - 00:00:00 CEST

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