TLDR Dev · ARTICLES & TUTORIALS

BRITISH COLUMBIA, TIME ZONES, AND POSTGRES

crunchydata.com8 min read

Summary from the TLDR Dev newsletter

British Columbia's shift to a permanent UTC-7 offset in 2026 shows the risks of storing future appointments in UTC-based database columns, which can lead to unexpected one-hour shifts in local time. These columns convert timestamps based on the rules available at the time of entry, so subsequent updates to time zone data can cause the stored UTC values to no longer match the user's intended wall-clock time.