At the beginning of June we have been seeing odd things happening with the times we've been saving. With what seems like 0 updates to our servers, or code, many of our applications have been randomly saving a 24 hr time format instead of a 12 hr format. First thing in my mind was to check the culture. So we added
Dim saveUtcNow As String
saveUtcNow = DateTime.UtcNow.ToString("T", CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture("en-US"))
data.SetValue(String.Format("SIG_T_{0}", "PI"), saveUtcNow)
In theory this should always force a 12 hr format. But for some reason, that has made no change. We are still seeing random times in 24 hr format.
We have not been able to identify a solution, or even a cause of this formatting change. Can anyone thing of other ways besides browser language that would even cause something like this when calling a function on the server?
Related
I am having a bit of a problem when saving times/dates to MariaDB.
Because of the UTC format that dates and times are saved it can save times 1 hour behind and dates can be saved as the previous day.
Most of the work arounds I have seen, involve pulling the data back from the DB and converting it, however I was keen to save it to the DB with the correct dates/times already entered.
I done this using {{moment.utc("Date_Entry").tz("Europe/London").format()}}
The problem I have at the minute, though, is...
If I want to leave the date/time empty, the function above saves the current date/time.
Ideally I would like to handler the UTC conversion if required, but if the entry is empty, save a NULL value to the DB
Does anyone know of a better solution than what I have currently?
I looked through online solutions for this, none worked for me so I'm posting here. I have separate date and time columns, both stored as integers. I am able to convert the date column to DATE, but not for the Time column. The column value is: 52700, when using TO_TIME(TO_CHAR(OHCRTM)) I get 14:38:20 but it should be 07:27:00. I've tried various formatting (TO_TIME(TO_CHAR(OHCRTM),'HH24.MI.SS') but I get a 'cannot parse' error. Any idea how I can get the correct time?
14:38:20 is the right answer, unless you can give us the logic that would make it 07:27:00.
52700 seconds are exactly 14 hours, 38 minutes, and 20 seconds.
Another option to read 52700 would be a time without the colons, ie 05:27:00. To parse it like that the needed SQL is:
select to_time(52700::string, 'HHMISS');
I guess 05 becomes 07 after a timezone conversion then?
I am applying the VRP example of optaplanner with time windows and I get feasible solutions whenever I define time windows in a range of 24 hours (00:00 to 23:59). But I am needing:
Manage long trips, where I know that the duration between leaving the depot to the first visit, or durations between visits, will be more than 24 hours. So currently it does not give me workable solutions, because the TW format is in 24 hour format. It happens that when applying the scoring rule "arrivalAfterDueTime", always the "arrivalTime" is higher than the "dueTime", because the "dueTime" is in a range of (00:00 to 23:59) and the "arrivalTime" is the next day.
I have thought that I should take each TW of each Customer and add more TW to it, one for each day that is planned.
Example, if I am planning a trip for 3 days, then I would have 3 time windows in each Customer. Something like this: if Customer 1 is available from [08:00-10:00], then say it will also be available from [32:00-34:00] and [56:00-58:00] which are the equivalent of the same TW for the following days.
Likewise I handle the times with long, converted to milliseconds.
I don't know if this is the right way, my consultation would be more about some ideas to approach this constraint, maybe you have a similar problematic and any idea for me would be very appreciated.
Sorry for the wording, I am a Spanish speaker. Thank you.
Without having checked the example, handing multiple days shouldn't be complicated. It all depends on how you model your time variable.
For example, you could:
model the time stamps as a long value denoted as seconds since epoch. This is how most of the examples are model if I remember correctly. Note that this is not very human-readable, but is the fastest to compute with
you could use a time data type, e.g. LocalTime, this is a human-readable time format but will work in the 24-hour range and will be slower than using a primitive data type
you could use a date time data tpe, e.g LocalDateTime, this is also human-readable and will work in any time range and will also be slower than using a primitive data type.
I would strongly encourage to not simply map the current day or current hour to a zero value and start counting from there. So, in your example you denote the times as [32:00-34:00]. This makes it appear as you are using the current day midnight as the 0th hour and start counting from there. While you can do this it will affect debugging and maintainability of your code. That is just my general advice, you don't have to follow it.
What I would advise is to have your own domain models and map them to Optaplanner models where you use a long value for any time stamp that is denoted as seconds since epoch.
We have a bunch of devices in the field (various customer sites) that "call home" at regular intervals, configurable at the device but defaulting to 4 hours.
I have a view in SQL Server that displays the following information in descending chronological order:
DeviceInstanceId uniqueidentifier not null
AccountId int not null
CheckinTimestamp datetimeoffset(7) not null
SoftwareVersion string not null
Each time the device checks in, it will report its id and current software version which we store in a SQL Server db.
Some of these devices are in places with flaky network connectivity, which obviously prevents them from operating properly. There are also a bunch in datacenters where administrators regularly forget about it and change firewall/ proxy settings, accidentally preventing outbound communication for the device. We need to proactively identify this bad connectivity so we can start investigating the issue before finding out from an unhappy customer... because even if the problem is 99% certainly on their end, they tend to feel (and as far as we are concerned, correctly) that we should know about it and be bringing it to their attention rather than vice-versa.
I am trying to come up with a way to query all distinct DeviceInstanceId that have currently not checked in for a period of 150% their normal check-in interval. For example, let's say device 87C92D22-6C31-4091-8985-AA6877AD9B40 has, for the last 1000 checkins, checked in every 4 hours or so (give or take a few seconds)... but the last time it checked in was just a little over 6 hours ago now. This is information I would like to highlight for immediate review, along with device E117C276-9DF8-431F-A1D2-7EB7812A8350 which normally checks in every 2 hours, but it's been a little over 3 hours since the last check-in.
It seems relatively straightforward to brute-force this, looping through all the devices, examining the average interval between check-ins, seeing what the last check-in was, comparing that to current time, etc... but there's thousands of these, and the device count grows larger every day. I need an efficient query to quickly generate this list of uncommunicative devices at least every hour... I just can't picture how to write that query.
Can someone help me with this? Maybe point me in the right direction? Thanks.
I am trying to come up with a way to query all distinct DeviceInstanceId that have currently not checked in for a period of 150% their normal check-in interval.
I think you can do:
select *
from (select DeviceInstanceId,
datediff(second, min(CheckinTimestamp), max(CheckinTimestamp)) / nullif(count(*) - 1, 0) as avg_secs,
max(CheckinTimestamp) as max_CheckinTimestamp
from t
group by DeviceInstanceId
) t
where max_CheckinTimestamp < dateadd(second, - avg_secs * 1.5, getdate());
I have an application that stores date and time in a string field in an SQL Server 2008 table.
The application stores the date and time according to the regional settings of the PC that is running and we can’t change this behavior.
The problem is that some PCs have to be in UK date format with 12h time (eg. 22/10/2011 1:22:35 pm) some with UK date format with 24h time (eg. 22/10/2011 13:22:25) and some have to be US date format (eg. 10/22/2011 1:22:35 pm) and (eg. 10/22/2011 13:22:25).
Is there any automatic way to change the string every time it changing/added to the table to UK 24h format so it will be always the same format in the database?
Can it be done using some trigger on update or insert? Is there any built-in function that already does that?
Even a script to run it from time to time may be do the job...
I’m thinking to break apart the string to day, month , year, hour, minute, second , AM/PM and then put the day and month part in dd/mm order and somehow change the hour part to 24h if PM, get rid of the “am” and “pm” and then put the modified date/time back to the table.
For example the table has
id datestring value Location
1 15/10/2011 11:55:01 pm BLAHBLAH UK
2 15/10/2011 13:12:20 BLAKBLAK GR
3 10/15/2011 6:00:01 pm SOMESTUFF US
4 10/15/2011 20:16:43 SOMEOTHERSTUFF US
and we want it to be
id datestring value Location
1 15/10/2011 23:55:01 BLAHBLAH UK
2 15/10/2011 13:12:20 BLAKBLAK GR
3 15/10/2011 18:00:01 SOMESTUFF US
4 15/10/2011 20:16:43 SOMEOTHERSTUFF US
We can display the date parts (day,month,year) correctly using the datepart function but with the time part we have problems because it changes too many ways.
Edited to explain some more
mr. p.campbell thanks for the edit .. i didn't know how to beautify it :)
and mr. Matthew, thank you for your quick reply..
We can tell if it is UK date or US date because we have another field i didn't mention with the text "US", "UK", "GR", "IT" according to where the PLC machine is located.
I'm sorry i didn't explain it to well. My english are not so good.
There are two different and independent applications. And they don't have direct relation with the sql server.
The application that only writes data to the database ..lets call it "the writer" for short.. and a different application that reads the data .. lets call it "the reader".
"The writer" is an internal application of a PLC machine that stores values every 1 min to the database that's why we can't change its behavior. It uses the string data type to store the date and the time at the same field according to the regional settings of the pc that a daemon application runs and does the communication between the pc and the PLC machine.
Now "the reader" expects the date and time to be in the format "dd/mm/yyyy 23:23:01" or "yyyy/mm/dd 23:23:01" and the only thing it does for now is doing some calculations with the data in the value field between given dates. eg. from 10/09/2011 10:00:00 to 15/09/2011 14:00:00.
we just need to do something like this ...
select * from table1 where datestring between "10/09/2011 10:00:00" and "15/09/2011 14:00:00"
I could post some of the code but it will be very long post.
At first, I agreed with Matthew, but then I realized that, given the information presented, this actually was possible (well, sorta).
However, some caveats;
You are doing nobody any favors by storing and maintaining the database this way. Your best bet is to change the application to have it give an actual Datetime value, not this mangled string.
This data CANNOT be meaningfully sorted by date or time (not without performing expensive string manipulation).
You appear to be storing all times as local times, but do not appear to be storing a TimeZone or related information. Without this information, you will NOT be able to (completely) correctly translate times 'globally'. For instance, which is later - 4PM in London, or 11AM in New York (for, say, an international conference call)? The answer is that you don't know: it depends on the time of year.
You are storing local times, period. This only works so long as local time is correct. What happens when somebody sets their clock to 1900? You should be storing time based off of the SERVER'S clock.
Your stored timestamp is based on a formatted string. If the user changes how their time is displayed, your data correctness (potentially) goes out the window. For instance, what if somebody removes the am/pm symbols, thinking "I'll look out the window - if the sun is out, it's 'am'"?
Please keep all of that in mind.
As to how to do this....
I'm not going to actually write out the SQL statement for this. Mostly because storing the information this way is pretty terrible. But also because it's going to take a lot of work I'd rather not do. I really recommend stressing to whomever has the keys at your place to get that application changed.
So instead, I'm going to give you a really big clue - and this will only work for so long as your timestamp format remains the same; You should be able to tell what format the date and time are in based on the presence and absence of 'am' and 'pm' in the string (if you don't have both, you're flat-out toast). As Matthew has pointed out, the formatting is also likely different for the date, as well as the time - you will need to translate both. However, this will immediately give you problems due to comparative timestamps (please see point 4, above); any attempt to run scheduling or auditing with this data id pretty much doomed to failure ("When did that happen?" "Well, it's in the UK date format, so..." "But that makes it 1AM here, and he was dead then!").
Most beneficial answer: Change how the information is stored in the database
EDIT:
And then it hits me (especially in light of the new edits) - there are potentially other possibilities that could actually make this work....
First, change your database to actually store some sort of 'globalized' timestamp, based off of the server's clock.
This will of course break your existing application code - it would get a data-type mismatch error. To fix that, rename the table, then create a view, named the same as the original table, that will return the string formatted as indicated in the 'source' column. You'll need to create instead-of triggers for the view, to translate the formatted string to an actual datetime value. The best part is, the application code should never notice the difference. You seem to have indicated that you have sufficient control over the database to allow this to happen; this should allow you to 'fix' the data transparently.
This of course works best if the incoming datetime values are absolute (not local). Hopefully, the values are actually supposed to be 'insert time' - these could likely be safely ignored, in favor of using a special register (like NOW or CURRENT DATE or whatever).
Can't believe this didn't hit me earlier...
You stated that you cannot change the application behavior, thus this is not possible.
Your problem is that your database doesn't know the culture / timezone settings of the client and your client doesn't report it.
You will need to report this data or think of clever ways to infer this information before you can act on it.
EDIT: For example, without knowledge of the client's details how could you tell the difference between the strings:
10/1/2011 12:00:00 (October First, noon, US)
10/1/2011 12:00:00 (January Tenth, noon, UK)
?