Worldwide site and Datetime storing?

Question

I'm looking for the best practice solution.

Take for example stackoverflow and a question I asked :

I live in Israel , and now the time is :

I did ask something at ~17:58 ( 3 hours before now)

Yet , it does show "3 hours ago" AND display UTC time . ( Israel is +2)

So either it saves both UTC and my offset

or it saves just UTC and in JS at client side it showes me the local time.

now my question is from a DB point of view :

I can detect from where the client has connected via JS command :

new Date().getTimezoneOffset(); //-120

I could store it like :

data  |    UTCTime          | userOffset
----------------------------------------
 ...    2012-12-24 15:36:31       -2

Question

• Is this the best solution of storing world wide events (datetimes) ?

• In c# there is a DateTimeOffset Structure type which store the offset inside it . is there any equivalent solution in Sql server ?

Answer 1

According to this post: you should always keep your date unified. So UTC would be the best choice.

On the other hand - when you have date in UTC you can easily show it right according to someones timezone (not only for the author, but for everybody).