Comments on: What Time Is It?

By: Thomas LaRock

Thomas LaRock — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 02:01:42 +0000

good points, thanks Stuart. will I see you at PASS again this year?

i think we will need to switch to using all UTC timestamps for everything we do. i also believe we should keep the local time of the server, so perhaps just the two columns will suffice. i do hate to store something twice, so maybe just the UTC will be enough.

By: Stuart Ainsworth

Stuart Ainsworth — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 01:41:29 +0000

I don’t use Operations Manager, but it does make logical sense to use UTC for your timestamps when dealing with time data. 2:00 PM EST is NOT 2:00 PM CST; that’s one of the hardest things to convince my boss when dealing with reports for clients.

As noted DST is fun to deal with; try also building a cube for data across time zones when you want to have a dimension by day (what day?UTC? Client local time? server local time?).

I’ve long since advocated that we all abandon the concept of local time, and we each determine our days based on UTC. If I work 12 noon to 8 pm UTC, so be it.

By: Thomas LaRock

Thomas LaRock — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:45:36 +0000

good point, and something to consider as some locations may not observe DST, or if they do, they may not start on the same day.

how come Star Trek never worries about such details when they time travel?

By: Jack Corbett

Jack Corbett — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:13:27 +0000

Great! Don’t forget about DST. That’s a lot of fun on environmental and manufacturing sytems especially in the Fall when you hit 1 and 2 am twice.

By: Dave Dustin

Dave Dustin — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 06:03:04 +0000

We store all time/dates as GMT/UTC and then adjust on the local server (if required).

We are quite lucky down here (New Zealand) that we are generally +12 hours from GMT, so our users can easily translate the times if we thorw a (GMT) in the display.

By: Thomas LaRock

Thomas LaRock — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 03:29:28 +0000

i suppose we could use the GETUTCDATE(), but will that work against SQL2000? If not, then we would need to split out our script to run two versions, one for SQL2000 boxes and the other for servers built in this century.

even with UTC, the OpsMgr agent is still going to run based on the local time. so, 24 servers around the world, and each one would be kicked off, every hour, like…clockwork! the question becomes: what value do you store in the repository? even with UTC, you would still have 24 different values.

By: Jonathan Kehayias

Jonathan Kehayias — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 03:20:08 +0000

Why not use UTC which should be standard across all three?