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British Columbia, Time Zones, and Postgres | Crunchy Data Blog

#crunchydata#time#column#timezone#tzdata#zone
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On March 8, 2026, British Columbia moved their clocks to a year-round Pacific Daylight Savings Time. In March, they did the spring forward one hour with their clocks to UTC-7, but they won't fall back to UTC-8 in November. Going forward, the UTC offset for America/Vancouver timezone is permanently UTC-7. Let's use this as an opportunity to talk about date and time zone storage. In the most basic examples, the default is to store the UTC value, then calculate local time relative to UTC. However, people using calendar systems think in terms of local time (i.e. wall clock time), and never consider UTC. After modifying time zone data, these time calculations from UTC for a region will differ from the user's input value. If you stored timestamps in a UTC-based column for British Columbia-based appointment in 2026 and beyond, your November through March appointments may be off by an hour! See timestamptz columns don't store the local time.…

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