David Johnson wrote:

> End users rarely use SQL directly in most environments. Make the
> conversions the responsibility of the GUI layer. If it is a hard
> business rule that local times exist only in the GUI display layer, and
> never leave that layer without being converted to UTC,
>
> Store all times in UTC/GMT. Perform conversions on input and display in
> the application layer. Depending on the precision and accuracy needed
> in your time stamps, it may be adequate to synchronize your system times
> every few hours with SNTP as Ivan suggested. If higher precision is
> required than a few milliseconds, then you may want to invest in some
> high precision timekeeping hardware. (it still bugs me that my $5.00
> disposable watch keeps better time than a $2,000 computer)
>
> It may be useful to also save the UTC offset for the creating and last
> updating user in numeric 3,1 format (+/- 12 hours with allowances for
> the 1/2 hour offsets in Newfoundland and other odd timezones), depending
> on your business and audit needs.

Thanks for that, I suppose now, I am going to have to work out what time
zone the server is in, so that I can do my conversion?
Is that straight forward?
It's a bit of a shame because I am converting from MySQL and that has a
"get server time in utc" function.
Richard