postgresql - postgres default timezone

Question

I installed PostgreSQL 9 and the time it is showing is 1 hour behind the server time.

Running Select NOW() shows: 2011-07-12 11:51:50.453842+00

The server date shows: Tue Jul 12 12:51:40 BST 2011

It is 1 hour behind but the timezone shown in phppgadmin is: TimeZone Etc/GMT0

I have tried going into the postgresql.conf and setting

timezone = GMT

then running a restart but no change.

Any ideas I thought it would have just used the server timezone but obviously not?!

SOLUTION!: I did set to GMT before and it was an hour behind. after searching around turns out that I needed to set it to Europe/London. This takes into account the +1 hour in British summer time, GMT does not!

Answer 1

The time zone is a session parameter. So, you can change the timezone for the current session.

See the doc.

set timezone TO 'GMT';

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Or, more closely following the SQL standard, use the SET TIME ZONE command. Notice two words for "TIME ZONE" where the code above uses a single word "timezone".

SET TIME ZONE 'UTC';

The doc explains the difference:

SET TIME ZONE extends syntax defined in the SQL standard. The standard allows only numeric time zone offsets while PostgreSQL allows more flexible time-zone specifications. All other SET features are PostgreSQL extensions.