Question

I need to be able to store a date (year/month/day) with no time component. It’s an abstract concept of a date, such as a birthday – I need to represent a date in the year and not a particular instant in time.

I am using Java to parse the date from some input text, and need to store in a MySQL database. No matter what timezone the database, application, or any client is in, they should all see the same year/month/day.

My application will run on a machine with a different system timezone from the database server, and I don’t have control over either. Does anyone have an elegant solution for ensuring I store the date correctly?

I can think of these solutions, neither of which seems very nice:

• Query my MySQL connection for its timezone and parse the input date in that timezone
• Process the date entirely as a string yyyy-MM-dd

Answer 1

I concluded that the best way in my current application (a simple utility using jdbc directly) was to insert directly as a string. For a bigger Hibernate app I might bother to write my own user type. Can’t believe someone hasn’t already solved this problem in some publicly available code though…