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We are using UTC time Zone as default in AWS RDS instance. All mysql databases are running in RDS instance following UTC. But based on the requirement I need to change UTC to EST so all DBs are running in EST. This is a trading platform and we suppose to go live in Production soon. We need to make sure we are alighted to EST time zone. We know how to do this based on AWS online documentation, but we are not sure if there would be any consequence or downstream effect if we change the AWS RDS default time zone from UTC to EST. If you changed this in your project, can you please share your thoughts. Also please share how we should handle US Daylight savings?

user3430726
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Why do you need to change? The only difference is what the claim the current time is. Why can't you just display the time as UTC - 5 or whatever it is.

I would do some push back on and figure out why the time zone needs to even shift? Programming best practice is to use UTC if I'm not mistaken?

Evan Erickson
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  • We are a trading firm and most of the old static servers runs in EST than UTC as we follow New York Stock exchange time. That makes non-tech analysts life bit easy when they run macro or do any excel work. I'm not saying that developers should not convert UTC-5 and save it in DB all the time. But we could save a lot of work if DB itself is running in EST as we don't need UTC time. We have Python and AWS Core tech stack. I wanted to understand if there is any unexpected impact after changing UTC to EST. If something comes in your mind feel free to share. Thank you. – Partha Apr 28 '21 at 00:38
  • Ultimately, I would have to read all your code and review it to answer that question. It is very possible you could cause a glitch and mess a bunch of things up, because you are reading / writing in one time zone and then switch it. You can mess up your database because some info was stored at a certain time, and now you are changing the format so new info won't be 1 to 1, even though it will appear that it is still displaying time. Usually I wouldn't alter any databases going forward with a new time. I would just create a new db and schema with that new time. I'm assuming you are using SQL? – Evan Erickson Apr 28 '21 at 17:49
  • We use mysql as DB. Python and .Net core used in API level. – Partha Apr 28 '21 at 18:03