Set the time zone for a Cloud Databases instance

You can set the server time zone for a Cloud Databases instance to be persistent by using the configuration groups feature of Cloud Databases. You can use either the Cloud Databases API or the trove command line tool to make the configuration changes. The examples in this article use the trove command line tool.

Prerequisites

• Trove command line tool

Setting the server time zone

The server time zone is set in MySQL with the default_time_zone parameter, and the default value is SYSTEM. To set default_time_zone to a different value you can use the named time zone for the region (from the IANA Time Zone Database) or the offset of the time zone from UTC (Coordinated Universal Time). For example, the name value for the Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST) time zone could be either Australia/Sydney for a region that observes daylight saving time, or Australia/Brisbane for a region that observes AEST year-round; because AEST is ahead of UTC by ten hours, the offset value that can be used instead of the named time zone would be +10:00.

You can set the default_time_zone parameter in a configuration group that can be applied to your Cloud Databases instance. You can create a new configuration group for the time zone change or add the time zone parameter to an existing configuration group.

Create a new configuration group

To create a new configuration group for custom time zone information, run the configuration-create command with trove.

The following example creates a configuration group named TimeConfig that sets the time zone to India Standard Time (IST), which is Asia/Calcutta in the IANA time zone database.

To set up a configuration group using the named time zone, you can set Asia/Calcutta as the value of default_time_zone, as in:

trove configuration-create TimeConfig '{"default_time_zone":"Asia/Calcutta"}' --datastore MySQL

To create the configuration group using the offset of IST from UTC, which is +5:30, use the offset value for default_time_zone:

trove configuration-create TimeConfig '{"default_time_zone":"+5:30"}' --datastore MySQL

Apply the configuration group

To apply the configuration group to an existing Cloud Databases instance, run the configuration-attach command with trove, as follows:

trove configuration-attach aab79bba-9eaa-4ac3-94fc-e4aaf46b4efb 26f6f753-3853-4bf5-9bfe-1765966ad2f6

The first argument is the instance ID and the second is the configuration group ID.

You can get a list of instances and their IDs by running the list command with trove.

trove list

Note: For the time zone setting to take effect, the Cloud Databases instance must be restarted.

Add to an existing configuration group

You can set the default_time_zone parameter can be set on an existing configuration group by running the configuration-patch command with trove.

The following example adds the India Standard Time (IST) time zone to a configuration group:

trove configuration-patch 26f6f753-3853-4bf5-9bfe-1765966ad2f6 '{"default_time_zone":"Asia/Calcutta"}'

Note: For the time zone setting to take effect, you must restart the Cloud Databases instance.

Checking the server time zone

You can check the current time zone setting for an instance by logging in to the mysql console and querying the value of global.time_zone parameter.

SELECT @@global.time_zone;

The returned value shows the instance’s current time zone setting.

+--------------------+ | @@global.time_zone | +--------------------+ | +06:00             | +--------------------+

If the time zone does not reflect what you set in the configuration group attached to the instance, the instance might need to be restarted for the change to take effect.

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