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Time Zones Fundamentals

A time zone is an area which observes a uniform standard time for legal, commercial and social purposes. The local time of places on different meridians are bound to differ. The time difference within a country may be more than two hours. Therefore, it is necessary to have a Standard Time for a country. That is why the earth is divided into 24 time zones.

Since events can occur in different parts of the world, we need a way to tell on which time zone happened. When we store a date value, we always do it in UTC or Coordinate Universal Time format.

How the service works?

The service registers any changes on the current offset value creating a history of time zone records.

A time zone record storage:

  • Start: The date when the register occurs.
  • Offset: The offset of the time zone, expressed as TimeSpan.
  • Id: Represents the time zone id associated to the offset.

A new value is registered only when its offset differs from the current time zone.