Bypass MySQL automatic GMT conversion when selecting TIMESTAMP fields - mysql

Question

There's lots of stuff on the internet about converting MySQL timestamps, how it works etc. But what I need is the opposite: knowing that MySQL stores every datetime data as UTC in TIMESTAMP fields, all I want is to direclty retrieve the stored UTC value without MySQL messing around the datetime with system/server/connection timezones.
You see, we've built a simple node.js feeder which reads from several third-part MySQL databases (so I can't change their timezone settings) and save the gathered data to a Elasticsearch, as a "denormalization process". As the original data comes from different timezones, I need to store them in UTC, so I can easily coordinate further GETs and aggregations.
I know I can set the connection timezone on the fly and I know I can change every timestamp field fetched in my node application, but since MySQL engine already stores timestamps in UTC, why should I add any other step if I could simply get it directly, without converting functions or costly data processings?
In a nutshell, I'd like to know: is there a way to bypass MySQL automatic GMT conversion?

Answer 1

MySQL provides a UNIX_TIMESTAMP function which returns a raw integer value. And that isn't subject to timezone conversions at all.
SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP( timestamp_col ) ...
But that returns a raw integer, not a datetime. The client would need to do the conversion into a "datetime" type object, if that's needed.
Another option would be to use the CONVERT_TZ function to convert to UTC from the session time_zone setting.
SELECT CONVERT_TZ( timestamp_col, ##session.time_zone,'+00:00')
But, that doesn't really "bypass" timezone conversion. One downside of this approach is if the session time_zone is affected by daylight saving time changes, there's ambiguity with a one hour period each year when the clock "falls back" one hour. e.g. Sunday, Nov 1 2015 2AM CDT transition to Sunday Nov 1 2015 1AM CST. (Converting back from UTC, if we get 1:30 AM in the session time_zone, we don't "know" if that's CDT or CST. And the conversion back to UTC doesn't know which it is either.)
Another option (which I think you already mentioned) is changing the session time_zone to UTC. Then you could just return the timestamp_col value as UTC. You could save the current time_zone setting, and set it back when you are done, e.g.
SET #save_session_time_zone := ##session.time_zone ;
SET time_zone = '+00:00' ;
SELECT timestamp_col ...
SET time_zone = #save_session_time_zone ;
But your client Connector might do some not-so-helpful conversions when the time_zone of the MySQL database session doesn't match the time_zone of the client, like the funky shenanigans the JDBC driver (MySQL Connector/J) does. (That concern isn't limited to returning UTC; that's a concern whenever the time_zone of the client doesn't match the time_zone of the database session.)

Answer 2

It looks like there's no way to get the original UTC value from a MySQL field; every single function uses the timezone setting, be that SYSTEM or any other you configure.
The way MySQL forces you to use a date conversion is, at least, very constraining. For example, say you have a MySQL server set to a timezone with GMT -03:00 and GMT/DST -02:00 and you store a datetime like '2016-07-01 10:00:00'. If you select this value after the DST has ended, you'll get '2016-07-01 09:00:00'.
You can't tell what time it is for sure unless you store the GMT offset separately or you previously know what timezone the server was when it was stored.
We used the second approach. We saved the server timezone and used it to calculate the offset and return an ISO datetime, so future calculations can be made easily.
DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS `iso_datetime`;;
CREATE FUNCTION `iso_datetime` (
p_datetime TIMESTAMP
) RETURNS VARCHAR(25)
READS SQL DATA
BEGIN
DECLARE _timezone VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT NULL;
DECLARE _offset VARCHAR(6) DEFAULT NULL;
SET _timezone = (SELECT timezone FROM network);
SET _offset = (SELECT SUBSTRING(TIMEDIFF(p_datetime,CONVERT_TZ(p_datetime, _timezone,'UTC')), 1,6));
RETURN CONCAT(DATE_FORMAT(p_datetime, '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%i:%S'), _offset);
END;
In order to do so, you have to load timezone info into MySQL, so the server can calculate the tz offset of the date for you.