How to set the timezone in a DATE datetype?

Question

How to set the timezone in a DATE datetype?
Thanks
Maximus

Answer 1

10.5 Date, Time, and Timestamp
The JDBC API follows the Java platform's approach of representing dates and times as a millisecond value relative to January 1, 1970 00:00:00 GMT. Since most databases don't support the notion of a time zone, the JDBC 2.0 API adds new methods to allow a JDBC driver to get/set Date, Time, and Timestamp values for a particular time zone using a Calendar. For example,
ResultSet rs;
Date date1 = rs.getDate(1);
returns a Date object that wraps a millisecond value which denotes a particular date, like January 3, 1999, and a normalized time 00:00:00 in the default time zone. The time component of the Date is set to zero in the default time zone since SQL DATE values don't have a time component. Since a Calendar was not supplied explicitly to getDate() , the default time zone (really the default Calendar) is used by the JDBC driver internally to create the appropriate millisecond value assuming that the underlying database doesn't store time zone information.
The following example retrieves a date value in GMT-Greenwich Mean Time.
ResultSet rs;
TimeZone.setDefault(TimeZone.getTimeZone("GMT"));
Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
Date date2 = rs.getDate(1, cal);
In the example above, a Calendar is passed explicitly to getDate() to inform the JDBC driver how to calculate the appropriate millisecond value. Note that the same result could have been achieved by simply changing the default time zone, and not passing the Calendar explicitly since the JDBC driver will use the default time zone by default.
Note that the two Date objects created above will not compare as equal assuming that the default time zone is not GMT, even if they represent the `same' date.
if (date1.equals(date2))
//never get here
This is because each Java language Date object really just wraps a normalized millisecond time value and these millisecond values will differ across time zones. If an application wishes to compare dates in different time zones it should first convert them to a Calendar.
An application should create a Date object using a Calendar. The application is responsible for specifying the time as 00:00:00 on the desired date when using the Calendar since JDBC uses this convention. In addition when creating a Time value the application must specify a date of January 1, 1970 to the Calendar used to create the millisecond value for the Time as this is the convention specified by JDBC for time.
Above from:
http://java.sun.com/products//jdk/1.2/docs/guide/jdbc/spec2/jdbc2.0.frame10.html
I hope it can help you!