Session Time ZONE

Question

Hi ALL,
Can you please suggest on this, how to do this:
If I run queries in my machine:
select sessiontimezone from dual
I get “+05:30”
And formula
select
to_number (substr(sessiontimezone,1,1) || '1') * (to_number(substr(sessiontimezone,2,2))+ to_number(substr(sessiontimezone,5,2)) /60) /24
from dual
Gives “0.229166666666667”
But when we are running same queries on Amit Rathore’s machine it is giving us
select sessiontimezone from dual
“Asia/Calcutta”
And error in formula
select
to_number (substr(sessiontimezone,1,1) || '1') * (to_number(substr(sessiontimezone,2,2))+ to_number(substr(sessiontimezone,5,2)) /60) /24
from dual
“Invalid Number”
Could you please suggest how we can change sessiontimezone to return hours and minutes (“+05:30”) in other machine?
Regards
Girish Sharma

Answer 1

Assuming you have 11g.
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E11882_01/server.112/e17118/functions162.htm#SQLRF06105
SESSIONTIMEZONE returns the time zone of the current session. The return type is a time zone offset (a character type in the format '[+|]TZH:TZM') or a time zone region name, depending on how the ?user specified the session time zone value in the most recent ALTER SESSION statement."
The default client session time zone is an offset even if the client operating system uses a named time zone. If you want the default session time zone to use a named time zone, then set the ORA_SDTZ variable in the client environment to an Oracle time zone region name. Refer to Oracle Database Globalization Support Guide for more information on this variable.Setting the Session Time Zone
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E11882_01/server.112/e10729/ch4datetime.htm#NLSPG263
{code}% setenv ORA_SDTZ 'OS_TZ'
% setenv ORA_SDTZ 'DB_TZ'
% setenv ORA_SDTZ 'Europe/London'
% setenv ORA_SDTZ '-05:00'
ALTER SESSION SET TIME_ZONE=local;
ALTER SESSION SET TIME_ZONE=dbtimezone;
ALTER SESSION SET TIME_ZONE='Asia/Hong_Kong';
ALTER SESSION SET TIME_ZONE='+10:00';{code}