Are you still on Daylight Savings Time?

Central Europe and many other countries switched back from Daylight Savings Time to regular time on this Sunday’s night. But others don’t. Thanks to a “wise” decision in 2006 the US will switch back to regular time in one week. And another “wise” man has decided that there’s no need for Russia to switch back to regular time (see the last paragraph on “DST” in this linked Wikipedia article) – so Russia will stay forever on DST being one hour ahead 😉 Samoa will simply jump from the end of the time zone puzzle now heading it end of this year – so there will no December 28th this year in Samoa (I wonder what will happen if they switch back one day?).

And if you wonder why your new Apple iPhone 4S drains the battery pretty quick the algorithm polling the time zone server in the internet every second might be the reason Why … 😉

Now you might ask yourself:
Why am I writing about all this stuff?

Simple reason: As you might know the database has time zone definitions in $ORACLE_HOME/oracore/zoneinfo since Oracle Database 9.2. Good news for everybody who’ll upgrade from Oracle Database Patch Set 11.2.0.2 to 11.2.0.3 – both contain TZ V14 so there’s no time zone adjustment post patch upgrade necessary. But the newest available Time Zone files is TZ V17.

One day a customer did complain to me about the misleading MOS notes calling it a “Time Zone Spaghetti”. Even though the note situation has been cleaned up  (at least a bit) and MOS Note:977512.1 contains the one-and-only script to change the settings you may watch a little 6 minute video about the background on DST published by C.G.P. Grey:

By the way, this is an overview on Time Zone Version per Oracle Database release until Oracle Database 11.2.0.3: