Re: Change in start/end of daylight period

G Quesnel wrote:
> I am starting to think that we will require a patch for our Oracle
> databases (all versions, all platforms) to deal with the change of the
> start date and end date of the daylight period (longer period of DST).
>
> I can't quite convince myself that we would need a patch to deal with
> date calculation, as it isn't obvious what should happend if you add 12
> hours, over a "fall back" or "spring ahead" period.
>
> The behaviour should be predictable when showing date/time values,
> converted to different timezone (offset). How would the system know
> which offset to apply ?
> (Is this derived from my location + date ?)
>
> Or am I worrying about something that doesn't matter, as all
> information is derived from the OS ?
>

If you simply transition from DATE to TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE data type,
and use INTERVALs for date/time intervals in your Oracle 9i+ database, this would become a non-issue, because with TSWTZ Oracle automatically handles daylight savings. More on this at http://www.dynamicpsp.com/!go?ln=narticle&aid=1 and in Oracle SQL Reference, data types section.

Hth,

    Vladimir M. Zakharychev
    N-Networks, makers of Dynamic PSP(tm)     http://www.dynamicpsp.com Received on Fri Apr 07 2006 - 14:43:42 CDT