[OpenSIPS-Users] Best practices inquiry: database timezone

[Bogdan-Andrei Iancu]

Hi,

I have to agree here - using UTC for DB is the best practice, IMO. This 
ensure the consistency across your platform and also easy to sync data 
between your platform and external sources (like CDR mediation with the 
PSTN providers).

Regards,
Bogdan


Vasil Kolev wrote:
> В 22:55 -0400 на 30.03.2009 (пн), Phil Vandry написа:
>   
>> I would like to know what the common practice is for dealing with the  
>> interaction of timezones with timestamps in the OpenSIPS database.
>>
>> I think it is certainly clear that storing timestamps as local time is  
>> a very bad idea in locales with daylight savings time. You can end up  
>> with ambiguous times and durations! For example, if your database  
>> shows a call that started at 1:30 and ended at 2:30 on the night that  
>> daylight savings time ended (at 2:00) then it is impossible to tell  
>> whether the call lasted one hour or two hours (it might have started  
>> at 1:30 daylight time and extended 2 hours until 2:30 standard time,  
>> or it might have started at 1:30 standard time and gone for one hour  
>> until 2:30 standard time). How will you rate that call?
>>
>>     
>
> In my experience (which is mostly postgres) the local type "timestamp
> with timezone" is what you need - it records the date in UTC with the
> timezone it was in, so in the end you always have the UTC time and can
> go from that. Or you can go to pure UTC, most unixes keep time in it
> anyway (and the timezone is just an environment variable that gets
> changed, to display the time to the user :) ).
>
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