Timezone abbreviation meanings and other timezone info

Question

Hi All,
I'm working as an Enterprise Architect for a multinational with multiple breeds of database all over the place.
I'm trying to ensure that the entire organisation is using the same (correct) timezone definitions and I need some confirmation and have some questions around oracles implmentation. Apologies if I'm missing the blindingly obvious....
As I understand it, Oracle lists the timezones either in file timezonelrg.dat or timezone.dat these are machine-readable contains information on timezone and abbreviation that users can see via V$TIMEZONE_NAMES. The information is based on Olson's zoneinfo.
There are often multiple abbreviations for a timezone, these refer to daylight saving and other adjustments that can be applied to that timezone area.
Timezone.dat also has offset information connected with the timezones and abbreviations. This is used for automatic daylight saving. It can only be accessed using a function.
Is this correct?
If so....Where do I find a list of the abbreviations, their meanings and the offsets (the Oracle Database Globalisation Support guide only lists 6 meanings, there are lots more)?
Is there a place that I can find a complete human-readable version of the zoneinfo database?
Thanks for your help in advance.
Cheers
Paul

Answer 1

You can obtain a list of time zone names and time zone abbreviations from the time zone file that is installed with your database by entering the following statement:
SELECT tzname, tzabbrev FROM v$timezone_names;
(Ref: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/itss/docs/oracle/10g/server.101/b10749/ch4datetime.htm)
However, a slightly bigger list can also be found at
http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/