Preserve timezone in PostgreSQL timestamptz type

Question

For an ISO8601 compliant datetime

2004-10-19 10:23:54+02

Is it possible to have that value, with +02 offset, reflected in the

Answer 1

Java developers can use Joda Time combined with Jadira UserType's PersistentDateTimeAndZone. Example:

@Basic(optional = false)
@Columns(columns = { @Column(name = "modificationtime"),
        @Column(name = "modificationtime_zone") })
@Type(type = "org.jadira.usertype.dateandtime.joda.PersistentDateTimeAndZone")
@Index(name = "payment_modificationtime_idx")
private DateTime modificationTime = null;

In this example, the DateTime information is in 2 columns:

1. modificationtime timestamp without time zone to store the timestamp in UTC time zone
2. modificationtime_zone varchar(255) to store the time zone ID as string (e.g. America/Caracas)

While Joda Time and Jadira (and Hibernate) is specific to Java (and is the de facto approach), the above approach of structuring the RDBMS columns to store both timestamp and time zone can be applied to any programming language.