International Date Functionality

How do people deal with international time differences within the same database. If I have a database on a server that can be updated from multiple client locations in different countries and/or time zones, what is the best way to deal with this.

I have worked with other RDBMS products that support this directly and I would prefer not to have to write application code to handle this; however, I am under the impression, from past experience, that Oracle does not really support this very well, i.e. I have to do date and time translations manually within client applications.

Any brilliance in this area would be appreciated.

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Scott Thompson
sft _at_ lucent . com