Hugo’s answer is mostly correct, but I’ll add a few key points: When you’re storing the customer’s time zone, do NOT store a numerical offset. As others have pointed out, the offset from UTC is only for a single point in time, and can easily change for DST and for other reasons. Instead, you should … Read more
I think that in order to answer that question, we should think about the benefits of using UTC to store timestamps. I personally think that the main benefit to that is that the time is always (mostly) guaranteed to be consistent. In other words, whenever the timezone is changed, or DST applied, you don’t get … Read more
This works for dates that currently have the same UTC offset as SQL Server’s host; it doesn’t account for daylight savings changes. Replace YOUR_DATE with the local date to convert. SELECT DATEADD(second, DATEDIFF(second, GETDATE(), GETUTCDATE()), YOUR_DATE);
Naïve datetime versus aware datetime Default datetime objects are said to be “naïve”: they keep time information without the time zone information. Think about naïve datetime as a relative number (ie: +4) without a clear origin (in fact your origin will be common throughout your system boundary). In contrast, think about aware datetime as absolute … Read more
SELECT * FROM tbl WHERE datetime < NOW() – INTERVAL 1 WEEK If your table stores datetimes in different timezone than what NOW() returns, you can use UTC_TIMESTAMP() instead to get the timestamp in UTC.
Use strtotime to generate a timestamp from the given string (interpreted as local time) and use gmdate to get it as a formatted UTC date back. Example As requested, here’s a simple example: echo gmdate(‘d.m.Y H:i’, strtotime(‘2012-06-28 23:55’));
string foo = yourDateTime.ToUniversalTime() .ToString(“yyyy’-‘MM’-‘dd’T’HH’:’mm’:’ss’.’fff’Z'”);
All three of the lines you’ve shown will give the number of milliseconds since the unix epoch, which is a fixed point in time, not affected by your local time zone. You say “this time is not the UTC time” – I suspect you’ve actually diagnosed that incorrectly. I would suggest using epochconverter.com for this. … Read more
The OP answered this question to change the default timezone for a single instance of a running JVM, set the user.timezone system property: java -Duser.timezone=GMT … <main-class> If you need to set specific time zones when retrieving Date/Time/Timestamp objects from a database ResultSet, use the second form of the getXXX methods that takes a Calendar … Read more
In Python 3.x, local timezone can be figured out like this: import datetime LOCAL_TIMEZONE = datetime.datetime.now(datetime.timezone.utc).astimezone().tzinfo It’s a tricky use of datetime‘s code . For python < 3.6, you’ll need import datetime LOCAL_TIMEZONE = datetime.datetime.now(datetime.timezone(datetime.timedelta(0))).astimezone().tzinfo