JDBC SQL Time zone

Question

I'm using Spring with apache commons BasicDataSource.

The time zone shows as GMT via:

SELECT @@global.time_zone, @@session.time_zone;

My input is in epoch time, 1386831420000 and 1386833220000, so the query should be like this:

SELECT * FROM table WHERE AND arrival_time BETWEEN '2013-12-12 06:57:00' AND '2013-12-12 07:27:00';

I enabled SQL profiing, and this is the query that actually gets executed, so I don't get the correct results:

SELECT * FROM table WHERE AND arrival_time BETWEEN '2013-12-12 01:57:00' AND '2013-12-12 02:27:00';

Notice that the times are off by 5 hours, since I am EST-5, and the time should be in GMT.

My question is: How can I tell MySQL or Spring JDBC not to use the client time zone, and simply to always use GMT?

Please comment if there is any detail I could add to solve the issue.

Answer 1

Try explicitly converting the date string into a date type using TO_DATE (or implementation specific date converter function)

SELECT * 
FROM table 
WHERE arrival_time BETWEEN 
TO_DATE('2013-12-12 06:57:00', 'YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS')
AND 
TO_DATE('2013-12-12 07:27:00', 'YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS')

The above example is in Oracle SQL but the principle of explicitly casting a date string to a date type is common throughout SQL implementations.

Answer 2

It sounds like the JDBC driver isn't properly detecting Mysql's time zone setting. You may need to specify the server's time zone in the connection string. Try adding

serverTimezone=UTC&useTimezone=true

to the connection string. For more information, refer to the JDBC doc at http://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs304/jdbc/connector-j.html#connector-j-reference