Timezone getting Oracle date

[Yan Zhou]

Hi,

I am using Oracle Thin driver on a table with a DATE column.

There are existing rows in the tables, their values are in UTC time zone, which may be different from the internal time zone of Oracle DB.

lastModified = rs.getTimestamp(1);
cal = new GregorianCalendar(TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC");
cal.setTime(lastModified);

SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat(...)
sdf.setCalendar(cal);
System.out.println(sdf.format(cal.getTime()));

What I wanted to do is to retrieve the date as in UTC time zone (regardless of DB timezone), I am expecting sdf.format() returns the exact time as in DB since it is already UTC. However, in reality, sdf.format() applies the time zone difference for a second time.

I wonder whether getTimestamp() returns time stmap using Oracle's internal timezone?

What am I missing here?
Thanks.
Yan

[Yan Zhou]

If I call getTimestamp() on a Oracle DATE column, what timezone info. is in the returned Date object?

Date object contains the number of milliseconds since 1970/1/1 GMT, which is the starting point, what is the end point? Say, Date column has 1990/1/1, is the end point 1990/1/1 in Oracle's default time zone?

Thanks.
Yan