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SQL Server
Tips by Burleson |
Specifying "Lawful Time"
Another problem is that some countries specify "lawful time" in
terms of solar time, or GMT (Greenwich Mean Time, which has not
existed for thirty years). Most nations on the Earth have learned to
live with daylight savings time and moved from GMT to UTC. If you
would like a history of the legal issues raised by past changes in
time definition, get a copy of the book Greenwich Time and Longitude
by Derek Howse.
Along the same lines, we survived Y2K, but nobody talks about what
we learned from it. For a lot of companies, this was the first time
anyone had looked at their legacy systems in years -- in decades, in
fact. I think we can assume that any legacy system that was easy and
cheap to replace was replaced. The next class of systems were those
that we thought would be easy to patch, and on those systems, the
Y2K staff went to work.
There was also a third class of software about which nobody knew
anything, but that existed, nonetheless.
The side benefit of inspecting this class of programs was that while
the programmers were fixing the date handling code, they could also
fix any other bad code they found. I do not know if anyone collected
statistics on how much the non-temporal parts of the legacy systems
were rewritten as part of the Y2K efforts.
This is a book excerpt from:
Advanced SQL Database Programmer Handbook
Donald K. Burleson, Joe Celko, John Paul Cook, Peter Gulutzan
ISBN: 0-9744355-2-X
http://www.rampant-books.com/ebook_dbazine_SQL_prog.htm
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