Re: Postgres and timezones

On 20/01/16 12:53, Albe Laurenz wrote:
> Steve Rogerson wrote:
>> Hi, this is wrong:
>>
>> # select to_char('2016-01-20 00:00'::timestamp at time zone 'Europe/Lisbon',
>> 'TZ');
>> to_char
>> ---------
>> GMT
>> (1 row)
>>
>>
>> It should be WET, "Western European Time". Is there something I'm doing wrong?
>
> That query will always give you your local timezone.
>
> Here in Austria I get:
> us
> test=> select to_char('2016-01-20 00:00'::timestamp at time zone 'Asia/Yerevan', 'TZ');
> ┌─────────┐
> │ to_char │
> ├─────────┤
> │ CET │
> └─────────┘
> (1 row)
>
> Yours,
> Laurenz Albe
>
That seems odd, but never mind. I'll ask the direct qn then given the above is
it possible to determine the short TZ, say WET in my example.

Thinking about it, probably not as I suspect that pg only stores the offset in
seconds(?) from UTC, so once it has parsed "2016-.... 'Europe/Lisbon'" it has
lost track of the origin TZ and in that case what else could "to_char( ...,
'TZ') mean then other than the current client TZ.

Steve