Date and time considerations

Using the Time Zone initialization property, you can set what time zone you want to use for the timestamp literal parsing and for the timestamp rendering. You can choose between local time zone setting and UTC.

• Date literals are interpreted in English format. This is important when day and month are specified as numbers where MM/DD/YYYY is used, for example, 15/1/2015 will cause an error.

  Note: The leading 0 can be omitted for MM and DD, for example 7/3 instead of 07/03. A two-digit year works, for example, 16 instead of 2016, but it is not recommended.

• When using UTC as Time Zone, all timestamp literals and timestamp parameters specified in a query are interpreted as UTC time, and timestamps being returned are UTC timestamps. However, it is possible to use localdate and tolocaldate functions to translate timestamps into local time. This is especially helpful when dealing with problems with the ambiguous hour at the end of DST time.

See example, Retrieve interpolated values using UTC mode and report UTC and local time.