Twice
a year, we have to adjust our system clocks for "daylight
savings" - we set our clocks forward by 1 hour in the Spring
and set them back 1 hour in the autumn. Does this cause any problems
for Rdb or DBMS?
A:
Rdb
and DBMS do not have any problems dealing with changing the system
clock.
However,
some applications may not be so well behaved. For example, in
Applied Materials' (Consilium) WorkStream product, setting the clock
"back" may prevent some LOTS from being moved until after
the time of the previous transaction passes. Basically, WorkStream
places a timestamp on the history records of a LOT and does not
allow the date/time of the current transaction for a specific LOT to
precede the timestamp of the last transaction. WorkStream will issue
the error message "transaction not monotonic." Meaning
that the date stamp on a particular transaction is earlier than a
previous linked transaction. This will not corrupt your database. It
will means that LOTS probably cannot be moved until the time catches
up. Most other functions within WorkStream should perform correctly.