Re: [PHP] 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 <[email protected]>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
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