Postgres Time Zone for Jira and Confluence Databases

Question

Hi,

Some of our postgres databases are using the incorrect timezone that does not correspond to our geographic location.   Is it safe to update it to another timezone eg. HongKong?

I did the following on Staging JIRA.

* Go to edit  /var/lib/pgsql/data/postgresql.conf file and change both log_timezone & timezone value to ‘Hongkong’
* Stop JIRA service
* Stop PSQL service
* Start PSQL service
* Start JIRA service
* Test on DB, the data format is updated to UTC+8 now
* Check JIRA pages, all time is correct.

Avinash Singh · Answer

Thanks

Andy Heinzer · Answer

If you are only changing the timezone of the database, I think you will be fine.  The KB Incorrect Times Displayed in JIRA indicates:

Further, dates and times are stored internally in JIRA's database and depend on the timezone of the database. For example, from PostgreSQL's documentation:

All timezone-aware dates and times are stored internally in UTC. They are converted to local time in the zone specified by the TimeZone configuration parameter before being displayed to the client.

So I don't think you will encounter any problems in regards to date/time changes because of this, but good job testing something like this on a staging server first!