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This law-enforcement agency stores its mainframe data with time stamps on every record. That can be important, especially in court cases, says a database admin pilot fish there.
"In my role as a DBA, I have the chance to educate the rest of the IT staff," fish says. "I was showing some programmers how easy it is to use the 'time zone' information available from the operating system."
Fish tells the crowd that the time-zone setting shows hours and minutes offset from UTC -- what used to be called Greenwich Mean Time.
Hours and minutes? Yes, fish explains, there are places where the official local time is shifted by an extra half-hour or even 45 minutes.