I tend to agree that dates and times are awful to work with but storing everything as a Unix timestamp still seems to be the easiest way to avoid most of the headaches, in my experience. there's nothing worse than trying to reconcile a database filled with naive dates with no associated time zone information. is it daylight savings? is it in this timezone or did they enter it while traveling and their computer automatically updated the time?
The simplest way to minimize these issues, in my experience, is to put the logic for converting local time into UTC in the program and only store the Unix stamps in the DB.
The simplest way to minimize these issues, in my experience, is to put the logic for converting local time into UTC in the program and only store the Unix stamps in the DB.