Re: Holding "datetimes" in a DB.

Hi, Richard I, too, tought about switching to UTC times in my database. The only reason for me was to get prepared for globalisation. A good article about this consideration is written at PHP Gangsta (sorry, German only): http://www.phpgangsta.de/die-lieben-zeitzonen The reason, why I did not switch to UTC, was the reason, that most of the pages I host have visitors mostly from Germany. If you have visitors from different countries, you first have to find out which time-zone they're in, which can be quite messy. Just watch this video about timezones (I added a jump-node that get's you directly to the interesting stuff): http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=84aWtseb2-4#t=230s But basically that doesn't matter that much, since you - anyways - don't get a time from the client, so you're stuck in this problem either way ... Each example, I can come up with, does apply to UTC saved timestamps as well as to non-UTC based timestamps. One consideration, if you only have to operate in one timezone, like I do, is stuff like cron-jobs. Since I only have Germany as main-visitor-source, I can safely configure the server to Europe/Berlin and pull out stuff like birthday-information at midnight. Please do also keep in mind here, that there are not only full-hour-timezones :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UTC_time_offsets But .... I can't come up with a problem that you wouldn't have with a local timezone instead of UTC ... Bye Simon On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 11:49 AM, Richard Quadling <rquadling@gmail.com>wrote: > Hi. > > My heads trying to remember something I may or may not have known to start > with. > > If I hold datetimes in a DB in UTC and can represent a date to a user > based upon a user preference Timezone (not an offset, but a real > timezone : Europe/Berlin, etc.) am I missing anything? > > Richard. > -- > Richard Quadling > Twitter : @RQuadling > EE : http://e-e.com/M_248814.html > Zend : http://bit.ly/9O8vFY > > -- > PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > >