The Feature

Christmas Is Over – Get To Work On Daylight Savings Time

December 26, 2006 on 6:35 pm | by Floyd Teter | In Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

I hope everyone’s holiday was at least as wonderful as mine. Now forget those visions of dancing sugarplums and start working on an upcoming issue with Oracle products – Daylight Saving Time.

Background

Under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, Daylight Saving Time begins 3 weeks earlier and ends one month later in 2007, running from March 11 to Nov. 4. The US Department of Transportation, which is responsible for administering daylight savings time, has published a reminder that can be found here. Oracle software does not support the extended periods of Daylight Saving Time.

Impact to E-Business Suite Users

>In the E-Business Suite, there are two types of date fields:

1) Dates with a time component to show a specific point in time.

2) Dates without a time component, showing date but not a specific time

The impact to E-Business customers on Daylight Saving Time will be that time values, whether recorded or displayed, will be offset by one hour from the actual time. Incorrect time values will appear in all date fields with a time component. In addition, there is a possibility of incorrect dates (for example, in the event that a transaction takes actually takes place at 12:55 a.m. but the system time lags the actual time by one hour) . Under certain circumstances, incorrect dates could appear in either type of date field.

The E-Business Suite customers impacted will fall into one or more of the following scenarios:

1) an EBS database running in an affected time zone (in other words, all EBS customers in the U.S. and Canada)

2) an EBS user with the “Client Timezone” profile option set to an affected time zone

3) Communications or data transfers between time zones, at least one of which falls into Daylight Saving Time.

At this point, Oracle has not heard much feedback from EBS customers so they’ve assessed this issue as a “minor inconvenience”. Nevertheless, they are working the issue.

Oracle Research

Although I’ve only discussed the impact on E-Business users, this issue also impacts the Oracle database and middleware. Although this is a developing issue, there are several sources of information available:

Oracle Metalink

• Notes 403311.1 and 399375.1 discusses the implications for Oracle E-Business Suite users.
• Notes 397281.1 and 359145.1 discuss the impact on and the patches for the Oracle database, Oracle middleware, and various supporting operating systems – many patches called for between these two notes. The latter note will also lead the reader to Metalink Note 396387.1, which covers workarounds when DST-related database patches are not available for a particular configuration.

Other Sources

• Oracle’s Director of E-Business Technology, Steven Chan, has written articles on this subject that can be found on the Oracle E-Business Suite Technology blog. The articles can be found here and here.

OAUG is also tracking this issue. Their progress can be followed here.

Next Steps

I suggest that every Oracle user in the U.S. and Canada should at least give some brief consideration to this Daylight Saving Time issue. Maybe it doesn’t impact your organization or perhaps you can live with the glitch. On the other hand, you may have a problem to resolve before March. If you fall in the latter category, you’ll want to start planning now.

Gee, don’t you wish it was still Christmas!