Re: sysdate, Time Zones and GMT
Date: 1995/07/02
Message-ID: <3t5h87$40p_at_light.twinsun.com>#1/1
drolfe_at_Eng.Sun.COM (David Rolfe) writes:
>In article cmd_at_shade.twinsun.com, eggert_at_twinsun.com (Paul Eggert) writes:
>> `EST' means something quite different in the US than it does in Australia.
>AhHa! That explains why Oracle hasn't made their NEW_TIME function work
>outside the US. You could always add another parameter which says which part of
>the world you are talking about.
Sorry, that wouldn't suffice either.
`EST' means different things in Australia,
depending on the time of year.
Sometimes it stands for `Eastern Standard Time',
sometimes `Eastern Summer Time'.
For the gory details on this subject,
FTP the latest Arthur David Olson tz tables from elsie.nci.nih.gov in pub/tz*.
Anybody who's serious about representing time zones
should make sure that they can represent the data in those tables.
I don't know of any database vendor who supports timezones well,
though some operating systems do:
SunOS 4, SVR4-derived OSes like Solaris and Unixware,
Nextstep, Linux, BSDI, and probably some others.
Received on Sun Jul 02 1995 - 00:00:00 CEST