Pivotal Global Technical Support has revealed a special statement including recommendations for solving the potential problems with Pivotal system connected with introducing the Daylight Saving Time.
On March 11, 2007, at the USA and Canada territory, the Daylight Saving Time has been introduced. Changes in conventional Daylight Saving Time lengthens it by four
weeks – DST starts three weeks earlier, on March 11, and finishes one week later, on November 4. This modification can be a cause of errors in the date and time functionality of the IT systems.
The content of the Pivotal GTS’s statement is presented below:
“The US Energy Policy Act of 2005 extended Daylight Saving Time (DST) in the US by approximately four weeks. As a result, beginning in 2007, DST will start three weeks earlier on March 11, 2007, and end one week later on November 4, 2007.
The change in DST applies only to the US and Canada. However, customers based outside North America may also be impacted if they have operations, customers or vendors that are based in North America. Additionally, customers who interact or integrate with North American-based systems, or rely on date/time calculations may also be impacted.
This email is intended to help you avoid potential DST issues that may arise with your Pivotal implementation.
What is the Impact Going Forward?
In response to the DST extension, major operating system vendors have issued patches. Because all record changes in the Pivotal system are time stamped, Pivotal customers must install the following patches to ensure timestamps will reflect the new DST correctly:
- For all Pivotal implementations, please refer to Microsoft’s “Preparing for Daylight Saving Time changes in 2007” article for details on how to perform DST updates.
- For Pivotal MarketFirst implementations, please refer to the Java update page for details on how to patch Java Runtime Environment 1.4.0 and later releases. For those customers running MarketFirst under the Sun Solaris operating system, please refer to the Sun OS update page.
It is important that ALL desktops (and servers) are updated as the Pivotal Rich Client relies on desktop-level settings for all dates passed to the Pivotal Business Server. Additionally, any system integrated to (or that otherwise interacts with) Pivotal should also be patched to ensure all records passing between the systems are time stamped correctly.
Please be aware that users may have already scheduled items within the affected four week time window in 2007. Before applying the OS patch administrators may want to run a report to identify those items, which must subsequently be updated manually.
What is the Impact to Historical Records?
Records in both the Pivotal and MarketFirst databases rely on a Universal Time Clock (UTC) to help determine their timestamp. The UTC currently assumes that DST will begin on the first Sunday in April and end on the last Sunday in October (as was the norm from 1986 until 2006).
After applying the Microsoft and/or Sun DST patches, UTC will calculate timestamps using the new DST reference (i.e., starting on the second Sunday in March and ending on the first Sunday in November) with the result that the timestamp for business data stored in UTC format prior to 2007 will be displayed erroneously, appearing to be off by one hour for the dates affected.
Pivotal is currently determining the appropriate solution and will notify all customers and partners shortly. In the meantime, Pivotal recommends that you DO NOT try to manually adjust (or create agents/scripts to adjust) the timestamp of historical Pivotal and MarketFirst records.”
