Hi Irina,

I would suggest reading or listening some of the works of Stephen Colebourne about this topic; I just found this summary: https://www.infoq.com/articles/java.time - in particular read the section about Timezones.

But the key fact is that time-zones are political creations. They are often used to demonstrate political control over an area, such as the recent change in Crimea to Moscow time. As with anything political, the associated rules frequently defy logic. The rules can and do change with very little notice.

Clearly, that should be enough motivation for us engineers to not rely on such a time reference; especially not for timestamped coordination or for any situation in which a timestamp is required to disambiguate different instants in the “continuous flow of time” which we rely on in our models of reality (ignoring more advanced physics for sake of practical applications).

I do wonder if we could do something better in Hibernate, but a the moment I can’t produce a better suggestion than to use UCT with NTP on any servers.

HTH