Demo: how TIMESTAMP breaks time in MySQL

Sat, 30 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This walkthrough puts the problem described in the article into practice.

The exercise

You need Docker and Bash. If you cannot run the experiment, you can see the result in SQL Fiddle. That version changes session.time_zone instead of the system time zone, but demonstrates the same issue.

Start MySQL, then wait for it to accept connections:

docker run --name time_test -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=helloworld -d mysql:5.7 && \
docker exec -i -e MYSQL_PWD=helloworld time_test bash <<< 'while ! mysql -u root -e exit 2>/dev/null; do sleep 1; echo -n .; done; echo " MySQL seems to be ready"'

Make sure the container uses UTC:

Time Pitfalls on Alexander Kurilo

Demo: how TIMESTAMP breaks time in MySQL

The exercise