[fpc-pascal] Timezone information in a dataset datetime field?- updated

Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl.fpc-pascal at telemetry.co.uk
Mon Jul 25 12:09:58 CEST 2011


Ludo Brands wrote:
>>> 1. Is there any way of knowing what kind of timezone a 
>> datetime value 
>>> should be in a FPC dataset? (I suppose not...)
>> No, there is no way. It's always supposed to be 'local time'.
>>
> 
> That is also what most of the underlying databases do. They store everything
> in UTC and convert to local time. Only for those that support "timezoned"
> field types (fe. oracle timestamp_TZ) you can specify a timezone when
> entering data. MySQL fe. doesn't have support for this.  

Pretty much the same for PostgreSQL. I went through all this a few 
months ago, and while I didn't explore data entry I found that for data 
output I had to apply corrections myself although I could get properties 
of the current timezone from an internal table.

In all cases the fundamental question is whether the OS has been 
installed with correct notification of where it's operating, and whether 
is has any mechanism to track what's going on if it's moved around.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]



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