I'm trying to help one of our DBAs.         He posed this
timestamp problem and I'm not sure how to resolve it.
"Our external gauges are writing their values into the database
information, along with the time the reading was taken, the time
is being written into the database as a character string and is
written as a GMT         Other systems reading this information
need to convert the string to a date and to their local time
zone thus need to be aware of the time-zone they're operating in
and take into account whether DST was/is in operation at the
time of the reading"          We're collecting real-time machine
statistics from many manufacturing plants across the country.
Roughly 3K/hour from 20 plants or every time a gauge changes.
It's a purchased app and we've been unsuccessful getting an
application change.  This data is forwarded to a SAP DB that
wants the local time.  He's thinking about writing a C program
as a function to do the time conversion.  The biggest problem is
adjusting the time