Difference between Paris and Zurich

When I was a child, I used to go skiing in the alps, and occasionaly cross the borders. I remember that late in the season (Eastern skiing) restaurants were already empty in France when we had lunch, because our neithbough countries introduced summertime before us.

It is a long way back, namely summers 1976 to ’80. In 1975 and before, neither of us had day light saving. In 1981 and later, we both had it.

Ok, I just had an issue with a wrong date in a customer application. Somehow our database is set with POSIX format, let’s say +01:00 and +02:00, derived from CET/CEST unix timezone (TZ=CET-1CEST,M3.5.0,M10.5.0)

Due to some obscure multiple conversions, dates for summer 1976-80 are wrong, so we sent birthday cards too early to our customers…

SQL> select to_char(cast(
timestamp '1979-08-01 00:00:00 CET'
as timestamp with local time zone),
'YYYY-MM-DD') from dual;

TO_CHAR(CAST(TIMESTAMP'1979-08-0100:00:
---------------------------------------
1979-08-01

but if set my session timezone to Europe/Zurich, which is currently equivalent to CET, I got discrepancies

SQL> alter session set time_zone='Europe/Zurich' ;

Session altered.

SQL> select to_char(cast(
timestamp '1979-08-01 00:00:00 CET'
as timestamp with local time zone),
'YYYY-MM-DD') from dual;

TO_CHAR(CAST(TIMESTAMP'1979-08-0100:00
--------------------------------------
1979-07-31

A good reason to specify the time zone name correctly in your create database statement !