It would be helpful if the time zone of a session could be specified at the time of the connection. This would avoid the overhead of a separate database query and round-trip to the database server when a single, non-default time zone is needed for the duration of the connection. Naturally there is the option of using GMT and dealing with the time zone offsets entirely in PHP or at some other layer. However, many large databases systems support connection-specific time zones and I've found them to be quite useful. It may also be useful as a way to set the time zone after the connection is made using "setAttribute". Since several supported systems are not time-zone aware, such as Sqlite, the attribute would not always have an effect. Or it could be implemented as a server-specific attribute such as "MYSQL_TIME_ZONE" or "PGSQL_TIME_ZONE". If a TIME_ZONE attribute seems inappropriate then another idea is to provide an optional, initialization query when creating the PDO object. For example, a "SET TIME ZONE 'CST6CDT'" query could be issued to set the time zone immediately after the connection is made. Such a mechanism may have other uses for queries that do not require processing the response. -- PHP Database Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
