Re: Oracle dates and timezones

I think that there is a way to tell a DB in which timezone it is. Try NLS_* parameters or something similar.

        Hadar Paiss

Bill Meahan wrote:
>
> [I asked a similar question before and got no response so I'll try again]
>
> How does one deal with timezones and DST (Daylight Savings Time) in Oracle dates?
>
> From everything I can see, Oracle stores dates "as entered" with no tracking of the timezone or
> DST status of the date. On a worldwide application, this can be problematic as (for example)
> someone in Dearborn, Michigan looking at a record entered in Warley, England will see a date that
> is offset from Dearborn time by 4 or 5 hours (depending on DST).
>
> For a "live" query, this is not too hard as I could somehow figure out what the timezone and DST
> status is at the "viewer" and use NEW_TIME() to do the shift. But what about during a report?
> How do I know what timezone conversion to use to specify a date range for a query?
>
> One thing that helps is to write applications such that all dates are stored in the database in
> UTC so I always see a date in the database in a known timezone regardless of the point of entry,
> but I've still got the problem of running reports which select date ranges and state dates using
> the timezone of the report initiator. This is especially true if I want to give users a
> reporting tool like IQ or Business Objects or Crystal Reports or MS-Access or .....
>
> Any suggestions? (Ideally someone would offer a PL/SQL stored procedure equivalent to the Unix
> library routines localtime(), gmtime() and mktime() but that might be dreaming)
> --
> Bill Meahan wmeahan_at_ford.com
> Ford Motor Company -- End User Support - North America
> Not an official statement of Ford Motor Company or anyone else
> except the author.
Received on Sat Mar 23 1996 - 00:00:00 CET