Re: Does PG really lack a time zone for India?

On Wed, Feb 15, 2006 at 12:33:30AM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> The existence of duplicate timezone abbreviations is certainly a pain
> :-(. The solution I would like to see is to factor all the hardwired
> timezone abbreviations in datetktbl out into a configuration file that
> could be adjusted for local conditions. However, it's not entirely
> clear how to deal with words that could be either a zone name or some
> other date keyword, for instance "SAT" is not just a day of the week
> but a known zone name in Australia.

I really wish we could clear up this stuff with the australian
timezones. I'd love a poll as to how often they're used because I don't
think most people want them. We run a business in Australia with plenty
of timezone related stuff yet that hack remains firmly off. For
example, SAT being South Australian Time is something I never heard of.
It's the same timezone as in Northern Territory. Maybe it's an old
term, since NT was part of SA before 95 years ago.

Australian timezones are East, Central and West plus daylight savings
for some states. If you search google for "sat south australia
timezone" most of the matches you get are for the postgresql
documentation. Most of the others either refer to ACST/CST or have SAT
as -9:00 [1] which is not a standard timezone anywhere in australia.

Wikipedia doesn't mention it [2]. This one reference [3] lists it as
alternate. But whacked out timezones like ACSST/AESST barely exist
outside of the postgres documentation. Try googling for something like
"aesst timezone -postgresql -postgres -pgsql" and you get a very small
set, much of which is postgresql related anyway (people which copied
our list).

The solution is to allow the timezone portion to be a string like
"Australia/Adelaide" and to leave these three letter timezones behind.
I made it work for my own timestamp type, so it can't be that hard.

Have a nice day,

[1] http://www.mhonarc.org/MHonArc/doc/resources/timezones.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC9:30
[3] http://www.astrodatabank.com/DCH/50alternatetimezonenames.htm
--
Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog(at)svana(dot)org> http://svana.org/kleptog/
> Patent. n. Genius is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. A patent is a
> tool for doing 5% of the work and then sitting around waiting for someone
> else to do the other 95% so you can sue them.