timezone problem

[Graham Brown_5]

In Britain we have just switched to British Summer Time
(BST), ie. GMT+1hour. Within our ITO system (based on ORacle) we have the
problem that the message alerts seem to hold GMT times in the database (viewed
with SQL), but when using the OpC Gui frontend to look at the data, the
timestamp is right (ie in BST).

We are sitting on an HP-UX machine with 10.20.
Our TZ is set to GMT0BST.

Any ideas?

[Terja Lange_1]

a) if you have not stopped and re-started your oracle
environemnt, it has this bad habit of not picking up the right timezone. The
best practice for oracle is to
stop and re-start

b) check the timezone in the oraenv environemnt, it
may not be set right.

[Bill Hassell]

All Unix systems keep internal time as GMT (aka, UTC or Zulu time). The $TZ env parameter is used by the many library routines to translate GMT to the value represented by $TZ. Unix is unique in that users all over the world can login and after setting $TZ to their local timezone, all commands and proceseses will display local time (complete with Daylight Savings Time switches). This is all controlled by /usr/lib/tztab entries.

However, processes that operate as daemons or in cron jobs do not login and may not inherit $TZ. See the man page for crontab where the (very simple) environment is discussed. There are 2 kernel parameters that can be used for daemons and cron jobs: timezone and dst. Read the Help-on-Context information in SAM for details on setting timezone and dst.