IIUG November 2026 TechTalk Meeting – Oninit® UDR — tzdte With Paul Watson
A time-zone-aware timestamp for Informix® — one indexable value that carries the instant, the zone it was written in, the offset that applied at the time, and which IANA release produced it.
Informix DATETIME has no zone. CURRENT follows the server’s TZ, and parsing and display can shift with DBTIME and GL_DATETIME. The usual workaround is a UTC DATETIME plus a zone-name column, which every query then has to remember to combine. tzdte packs both into one 16-byte opaque type that sorts, indexes and compares like a timestamp, and that answers “what time was that in Chicago?” without a second column.
Paul Watson has been using Informix for 35 years, moving to consultancy after 5 years. Along with three other consults formed Oninit (UK), and eventually Oninit (US) in 2006. Paul travels globally specializing in ER, Timeseries and UDR work. Building a Data Warehouse with Informix and MariaDB.