In many applications, accurately handling time zones is essential for ensuring consistency across various regions. SQL provides straightforward methods for retrieving the time zone offset and session time zone, enabling precise time adjustments.
In NetSuite, when working with time zones in SuiteQL, there are two key functions to understand: TZ_OFFSET and SESSIONTIMEZONE. These functions allow you to determine time zone offsets for specific regions and to retrieve the session’s current time zone, which can be essential for managing dates and times accurately in your NetSuite reports and scripts.
To retrieve both the time zone offset for a specific region and the session’s time zone, you can combine these functions in a single query:
SELECT TZ_OFFSET('US/Pacific') AS Offset, SESSIONTIMEZONE AS SessionTimeZone FROM Dual
This query returns:
- TZ_OFFSET(‘US/Pacific’): This function call returns the UTC offset for the specified time zone (US/Pacific) based on the date the query is run. The result is displayed in the Offset column.
- SESSIONTIMEZONE: This function retrieves the time zone setting for the current session, which could be in the form of a time zone offset (+/-HH:MM) or a region name, depending on how the session time zone was set. The result is displayed in the SessionTimeZone column.
- FROM Dual: In Oracle SQL and SuiteQL, the Dual table is a dummy table often used when you only need to retrieve a calculation or function result without querying an actual data table.
The output might look like this:
Offset
SessionTimeZone
-08:00
America/Los_Angeles