You don't drop the timezone information. You manually normalize the timezone to UTC time, application side, before storing it in the database. This is to get around MySQL's crap handling of datetime types:
- TIMESTAMP 'stores' timezone, but it has a limit of year 2038.
- DATETIME has a limit of year 9999, but it does not store timezone at all.
There really is no better way. Pick DATETIME for its higher capacity, then only ever use UTC time in the database to get around the lack of timezone storage in DATETIME.
> There really is no better way. Pick DATETIME for its higher capacity, then only ever use UTC time in the database to get around the lack of timezone storage in DATETIME.
From what I understand, this would mean that you would always have to set the value of datetime columns manually (with a UTC-adjusted value) instead of being able to use 'ON UPDATE current_timestamp'.
Of course, that's unless you set the server time to use UTC (as you suggested above), which strikes me as an extreme and not-very-portable approach.
- TIMESTAMP 'stores' timezone, but it has a limit of year 2038.
- DATETIME has a limit of year 9999, but it does not store timezone at all.
There really is no better way. Pick DATETIME for its higher capacity, then only ever use UTC time in the database to get around the lack of timezone storage in DATETIME.