Storing dates as UTC in database
- by James
I am storing date/times in the database as UTC and computing them inside my application back to local time based on the specific timezone. Say for example I have the following date/time:
01/01/2010 00:00
Say it is for a country e.g. UK which observes DST (Daylight Savings Time) and at this particular time we are in daylight savings. When I convert this date to UTC and store it in the database it is actually stored as:
31/12/2009 23:00
As the date would be adjusted -1 hours for DST. This works fine when your observing DST. However, what happens when the clock is adjusted back? When I pull that date from the database and convert it to local time that particular datetime would be seen as 31/12/2009 23:00 when in reality it was processed as 01/01/2010 00:00.
Correct me if I am wrong but isn't this a bit of a flaw when storing times as UTC?
