In MySQL caculating offset for a time zone

Question

Is there a way in MySQL to calculate the offset for any timezone? For example, to get the local time in the timezone Asia/calcutta. What I want to do is calculate the offset for this timezone and add that offset to GMT to get the local time.

Answer 1

If you want to calculate the offset of a time zone such as America/Vancouver from UTC you can do it as follows:

SELECT (unix_timestamp() -  unix_timestamp(convert_tz(now(), 'Etc/UTC', 'America/Vancouver'))) / 3600   as offset;

For this to work you will first need to load the time zone information into mysql as outlined here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysql-tzinfo-to-sql.html