RE: GMT VS LOCAL TIME PROBLEM

From: Wolfson Larry - lwolfs <lawrence.wolfson_at_acxiom.com>
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 19:52:12 -0500
Message-ID: <433A07749711884D8032B6A0AB115262C2BD82@conmsx07.corp.acxiom.net>

Thanks Marc! Looking at it now.  

Marc Perkowitz [mperkowitz_at_twjconsulting.com] Sent me:  

Larry,

I would start with the "Oracle9i Application Developer's Guide - Fundamentals" Chapter 3 Handling Time Zones.

Basically you can convert a date into a timestamp with a timezone (in your case UTC which is the true GMT). Then there are functions to convert that timestamp to any other timezone (in your case, whatever the local timezone is).

My understanding is that Oracle does handle all of the DST transitions. The only time I am not sure of is what happens if a country decides to alter their DST transition such as Australia did during the 2000 Olympics. I don't know how Oracle would get that change to your database.

Here's a blurb from the manual:

"New Date and Time Types

The new datatype TIMESTAMP records time values including fractional seconds.

New datatypes TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE and TIMESTAMP WITH LOCAL TIME ZONE

allow you to adjust date and time values to account for time zone

differences. You can specify whether the time zone observes daylight savings

time, to account for anomalies when clocks shift forward or backward. New

datatypes INTERVAL DAY TO SECOND and INTERVAL YEAR TO MONTH represent

differences between two date and time values, simplifying date arithmetic."

Hope that helps.

Marc.

 <http://www.freelists.org/archives/oracle-l/>

---

The information contained in this communication is confidential, is intended only for the use of the recipient named above, and may be legally privileged. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution, or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited.
If you have received this communication in error, please re-send this communication to the sender and delete the original message or any copy of it from your computer system. Thank You.

--
To unsubscribe - mailto:oracle-l-request_at_freelists.org&subject=unsubscribe 
To search the archives - http://www.freelists.org/archives/oracle-l/

Received on Mon Sep 13 2004 - 19:47:53 CDT