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Calculate time from date taken with different timezone

I have a MySQL database which is storing a datetime value, let's say 2020-10-11 12:00:00. (yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss format)
The type of this date (in mysql) is DATETIME
When I retrieve this data in my controller, it has the java 7 type "Date". But it adds a timezone CEST due to my locale I suspect. Here I already find confusing that when displaying this date which is not supposed to have a timezone attached it actually has... and the debugger says it is "2020-10-11 12:00:00 CEST".
My problem is that date was not stored with the CEST timezone. It was stored with the America/New_York one, for example. EDIT: What I mean with this line, is that the date was stored from new york using the timezone of new york. So, it was really 12:00:00 AM there, but here in Madrid it was 18:00:00 PM. I need that 18:00:00.
So in New York, someone did an insert at that time. Which means that the time in Europe was different. I need to calculate which time was in Europe when in America was 12AM. But my computer keeps setting that date to CEST when I retrieve it so all my parsing attempts are failing... This was my idea:
Date testingDate // This date is initialized fetching the "2020-10-11 12:00:00" from mySql
Calendar calendar = new GregorianCalendar()
calendar.setTime(testingDate)
calendar.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("America/New_York")
SimpleDateFormat localDateFormatter = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss")
TimeZone localTimeZone = TimeZone.getTimeZone("Europe/Madrid")
localDateFormatter.setTimeZone(localTimeZone)
String localStringDate = localDateFormatter.format(calendar.getTime())
Date newDate = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss").parse(localStringDate)
Here my idea is that: I create a brand new calendar, put on it the time that I had on America and I also say hey this calendar should have the America Timezone. So when I get the time of it using a formatter from Europe it should add the corresponding hours to it. It makes a lot of sense in my head but it is just not working in the code D: And I really don't want to calculate the time difference by myself and adding or substracting the hours because that would look extremely hardcoded in my opinion.
Can any one give me some ideas of what I'm interpreting wrong or how should I tackle this problem in a better way?
Important: I'm using java 7 and grails 2.3.6.

My problem is that date was not stored with the CEST timezone. It was stored with the America/New_York one, for example.
From what I know of MySQL, this is impossible.
Calendar calendar = new GregorianCalendar()
No, don't. The calendar API is a disaster. Use java.time, the only time API in java that actually works and isn't completely broken / very badly designed. If you can't (java 7 is extremely out of date and insecure, you must upgrade!), there's the jsr310 backport. Add that dependency and use it.
Let me try to explain how to understand time first, because otherwise, any answer to this question cannot be properly understood:
About time!
There are 3 completely different concepts and they are all often simplified to mean 'time', but you shouldn't simplify them - these 3 different ideas are not really related and if you ever confuse one for another, problems always occur. You cannot convert between these 3 concepts unless you do so deliberately!
"solarflares time": These describe the moment in time as a universal global concept that something occurred or will occur. "That solar flare was observed at X" is a 'solarflares' time. Best way to store this is millis since epoch.
"appointment time": These describe a specific moment in time as it was or will be in some localized place, but stated in a globally understandable way. "We have a zoom meeting next tuesday at 5" is one of these. It's not actually constant, because locales can decide to adopt new timezones or e.g. move the 'switch date' for daylight savings. For example, if you have an appointment at your dentist on 'november 5th, at 17:00, 2021', and you want to know how many hours are left until your appointment starts, then the value should not change just because you flew to another timezone and are looking at this number from there. However, it should change if the country where you made the appointment in decided to abolish daylight savings time. That's the difference between this one and the 'solarflares' one. This one can still change due to political decisions.
"wake-up-alarm time": These describe a more mutable concept: Some way humans refer to time which doesn't refer to any specific instant or is even trying to. Think "I like to wake up at 8", and thus the amount of time until your alarm will go off next is continually in flux if you are travelling across timezones.
Now, on to your question:
I have a MySQL database which is storing a datetime value, let's say 2020-10-11 12:00:00. (yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss format)
Not so fast. What exact type does that column have? What is in your CREATE TABLE statement? The key thing to figure out here is what is actually stored on disk? Is it solarflare, appointment, or wakeup-alarm? There's DATE, DATETIME and TIMESTAMP, and over the years, mysql has significantly changed how these things are stored.
I believe that, assuming you are using the modern takes on storage (So, newish mysql and no settings to explicitly emulate old behaviour), e.g. a DATETIME stores sign, year, day, hour, minute, and second under the hood, which means it is wakeup alarm style: There is no timezone info in this, therefore, the actual moment in time is not set at all and depends on who is asking.
Contrast to TIMEZONE which is stored as UTC epoch seconds, so it's solarflares time, and it doesn't include any timezone at all. You'd have to store that separately. As far as I know, the most useful of the 3 time representations (appointment time) is not a thing in mysql. That's very annoying; mysql tends to be, so perhaps par for the course.
In java, all 3 concepts exist:
solarflares time is java.time.Instant. java.util.Date, java.sql.Timestamp, System.currentTimeMillis() are also solarflares time. That 'Date' is solarflares timestamp is insane, but then there is a reason that API was replaced.
appointment time is java.time.ZonedDateTime
wakeup-alarm time is java.time.LocalDateTime.
When I retrieve this data in my controller, it has the java 7 type "Date".
Right. So, solarflares time.
Here's the crucial thing:
If the type of time stored in MySQL does not match the type of time on the java side, pain happens.
It sure sounds like you have wakeup-alarm time on disk, and it ends up on java side as solarflares time. That means somebody involved a timezone conversion. Could have happened internally in mysql, could have happened in flight between mysql and the jdbc driver (mysql puts it 'on the wire' converted), or the jdbc driver did it to match java.sql.Timestamp.
The best solution is not to convert at all, and the only real way to do that is to either change your mysql table def to match java's, so, make that CREATE TABLE (foo TIMESTAMP), as TIMESTAMP is also solarflares time, or, to use, at the JDBC level, not:
someResultSet.getTimestamp(col);
as that returns solarflares time, but:
someResultSet.getObject(col, LocalDateTime.class);
The problem is: Your JDBC driver may not support this. If it doesn't, it's a crappy JDBC driver, but that happens sometimes.
This is still the superior plan - plan A. So do not proceed to the crappy plan B alternative unless there is no other way.
Plan B:
Acknowledge that conversion happens and that this is extremely annoying and errorprone. So, make sure you manage it, carefully and explicitly: Make sure the proper SET call is set up so that mysql's sense of which timezone we are at matched. Consider adding storing the timezone as a column in your table if you really need appointment time. etcetera.

Thanks to #rzwitserloot I was able to find out a solution.
First I'll get the data from the database. I'll get rid of any timezone added by the driver / mysql by converting it to a LocalDateTime. Then, I'll create a new ZonedDateTime using the Timezone that was used when storing the data in the database.
Once I have a ZonedDateTime, it is time to convert it using my current timezone. I'll get a new ZonedDateTime object with the proper time.
Then I just add a few more lines to convert it back to my main "Date" class:
I've used the ThreeTen backport as suggested.
Date dateMySQL //Initialized with the date from mysql
Calendar calendar = new GregorianCalendar()
calendar.setTime(dateMySQL)
org.threeten.bp.LocalDateTime localDateTime = org.threeten.bp.LocalDateTime.of(calendar.get(Calendar.YEAR), calendar.get(Calendar.MONTH)+1,
calendar.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH), calendar.get(Calendar.HOUR_OF_DAY), calendar.get(Calendar.MINUTE),
calendar.get(Calendar.SECOND))
String timezone //Initialized with the timezone from mysql (Ex: "America/New_York")
ZonedDateTime zonedDateTime = ZonedDateTime.of(localDateTime, ZoneId.of(timezone))
ZonedDateTime utcDate = zonedDateTime.withZoneSameInstant(ZoneId.of("Europe/Madrid"))
calendar.setTimeInMillis(utcDate.toInstant().toEpochMilli())
Date desiredDate = calendar.time
dateMySQL: "2020-10-11 10:00:00" // CEST due to my driver
timezone: "America/New_York"
desiredDate: "2020-10-11 19:00:00" // CEST Yay!

Java Entity Hibernate to Oracle Timezone conversion issue

My DB is running in ET time. My java application server is running in PT timezone.
Application code --- entitybean.setdate(Util.converCurrentDateToTimeZoneDate("ET"));
public static Date converCurrentDateToTimeZoneDate(String timeZone){
Calendar calInput = new GregorianCalendar();
Calendar calOutput = new GregorianCalendar();
if (timeZone.equals("ET")){
calInput.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("America/New_York"));
}
if (timeZone.equals("PT")){
calInput.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("America/Los_Angeles"));
}
if (timeZone.equals("CT")){
calInput.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("America/Chicago"));
}
if (timeZone.equals("MT")){
calInput.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("America/Denver"));
}
calOutput.setTimeZone(calInput.getTimeZone());
return calOutput.getTime();
}
The scenario is :
If my server time is 1:00 PM PT time, the util is converting it to 4:00PM ET correctly, which is the value which i want to store in table.
But when I save the entity the value that is getting reflected in table is 4:00 PM PT.
Please help in resolving this issue ?

I'm not sure I got your point but I hope a comment about my experience could help you in finding the correct answer. Assuming that you are using an Oracle DATE type, to the best of my knowledge, it doesn't have any timezone information in it (as Java DATE, it stores a time difference in ms). You deal with timezones only when you display or represent a date.
If you keep this in mind you can ignore timezones on db side of your application and focus on the Java client; for example if you can consider all dates in PT timezone, store them as dates on database, and represent them with the timezone you need only when you have to diplay them.
Please consider this link for further reading about this issue:
How to store date/time and timestamps in UTC time zone with JPA and Hibernate
Hope this helps.

How to get only year from a date stored in OrientDB

I'm working on JBake, and would like to get the year part of the date at which a document was stored.
I know I can get the date by doing
SELECT date FROM post
And OrientDB will return me a java.util.Date.
I know I can also add the year as another field, but I find this data duplication unsatistfying.
So, is it possible to store the date, and to to have the year extracted through some kind of SQL "function" ?
Typically I would love to do
SELECT date, {date.getYear()} FROM post

You could use the format() function using the SimpleDateFormat syntax:
select date.format('YYYY') from post

Sqlite Query is not working properly

I have created a database with a String column which contains dates in String format (dd/mm/yyyy). I want to fetch the data from that table which is between two given dates, but when I tried with the below query, I found that it doesn't make any difference what month and year I have selected; it compares the "dd" field only from "dd/mm/yy".
The below query will display all the data which is between day 14 to 25 from every month and year. I want data between the given date, month, and year.
Select * from RunningLog
where CAST(RunDate AS DATETIME) between CAST('14/04/2011' AS DATETIME) and
CAST('25/04/2011' AS DATETIME)

Please see my answer here about how dates are (or are not) stored in sqlite3. Sqlite doesn't have a date field, so its actually stored as a string. Trying to sort / filter on this will prove to be difficult. Instead use an int field, and store the time in milliseconds.
I prefer INTEGER / Unix time storage, then use the built in date and time functions to format when pulling from DB.
Example:
long millis = Calendar.getTimeInMillis();
Store millis in the database as an integer. Then, refer to the first link on how to use the date and time functions in sqlite3.

Sqlite3 documentation does not say it can cast a datetime: http://www.sqlite.org/lang_expr.html (refer to Cast expressions numeral). Why don't you do that from Java? I mean, how are you storing the dates in the database? I highly recommend saving a long (Unix time); that way you can easily get a couple of long numbers that represent an exact date and time and use them to query your table.

Recomendation: Use Datetime fields in the database and JodaTime as a Time library.
Is quite easy to parse the datetime into a DateTime object and then you have many useful methods to compare and work with dates.
Also, your SQL queries will be better.

You can compute the number of seconds between two dates. Here is an example:
SELECT strftime('%s','now') - strftime('%s','2004-01-01 02:34:56');
Based on the sign of the difference you can say if one date is before another. In your case you have to do two comparisons, so you have to verify the sign of two differences. Here you can find other examples, maybe they give you other ideas (http://www.sqlite.org/cvstrac/wiki?p=DateAndTimeFunctions).

Java date - 12am is stored as 24?

So me and my partner have been working on this project for a while now. We work with dates A LOT in this project, and we recently noticed an issue, and we are rather deep in at this point.
We store our times in SQLlite (Android project) as a formatted string, since a lot of the time they are directly bound to listviews and such.
The problem we noticed, which i found kind of odd, is that that SimpleDateTimeFormat object, when used to format to 24h time (its a medical based project, so 24h time is the convention here) 12:00am-12:59am are formatted to 24:00-24:59, instead of 00:00-00:59...
This isn't too much of an issue until we query the database and order the results by the dates, any data that is between 12:00am and 12:59am will show up at the end of the list, but it should show up at the beginning...
Anyone else encountered this problem? or know a way around it? The best thing possible would be a way to store the data as 00:00 not 24:00.
Cheers

I strongly suspect you're using the wrong pattern. We've got to guess as you haven't posted any code (hint, hint), but I suspect you're using a pattern such as
kk:mm:ss
instead of
HH:mm:ss
Sample code:
import java.util.*;
import java.text.*;
public class Test {
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
SimpleDateFormat broken = new SimpleDateFormat("kk:mm:ss");
broken.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("Etc/UTC"));
SimpleDateFormat working = new SimpleDateFormat("HH:mm:ss");
working.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("Etc/UTC"));
Date epoch = new Date(0);
System.out.println(broken.format(epoch));
System.out.println(working.format(epoch));
}
}
Additionally, as others have pointed out, you shouldn't be storing your values in string format to start with... avoid string conversions wherever you can, as each conversion is a potential pain point.

Please read this and this about how SQLite stores dates (or doesn't store dates). SQLite doesn't have a "Date" type, so it is stored as a string. You should store your date as an integer (milliseconds), and then you can use date and time functions to pull them out (from the first link).
From the documentation
1.2 Date and Time Datatype
SQLite does not have a storage class set aside for storing dates
and/or times. Instead, the built-in Date And Time Functions of SQLite
are capable of storing dates and times as TEXT, REAL, or INTEGER
values:
TEXT as ISO8601 strings ("YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.SSS"). REAL as Julian
day numbers, the number of days since noon in Greenwich on November
24, 4714 B.C. according to the proleptic Gregorian calendar. INTEGER
as Unix Time, the number of seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC.
Applications can chose to store dates and times in any of these
formats and freely convert between formats using the built-in date and
time functions.
I prefer INTEGER / Unix time storage, then use the built in date and time functions to format when pulling from DB.
EDIT: Also, this will take care of sorting. I'm guessing your current "sorting" of the dates in SQLite is string based, which is bad mmmmkay.

What is the format string you are passing to your SimpleDateFormat? According to the docs, using 'H' for the hours should get you 0-23, using 'k' should get you 1-24.