Louis Davidson knows what time it is:
Recently a topic came up at work, and I remember seeing it on Reddit, so you know, that definitely is a sign that I had to write a blog on it.
For a lot of people, we typically standardize on a single time zone for our life, and in turn our data. Maybe it is the time zone of our headquarters, our house, and sometimes it is the standard time zone UTC. It is often suggested that every organization should use UTC, and that is a great suggestion for many things.
However…if you store all your times as UTC, this becomes a nightmare for some kinds of reporting.
Click through for a primer on the capabilities of the DATETIMEOFFSET data type and some of the functionality you can use with it. And Louis hits on one important note around daylight savings time changes: the date changes over the years. Another is that what’s in the Windows or Linux time zone database isn’t always historically accurate. For example, in 1974 and 1975, the US extended DST and began it in January and Feburary, respectively. But if you use Louis’s query, it claims DST started in April, which would have followed the 1966-1973 and 1976-2006 patterns but is historically inaccurate. You’ll find these sorts of things for a variety of countries because Daylight Savings Time adherence is kind of wild.