Lost in Time: Surviving the Timezone Maze

You’re familiar with Oracle’s well-known DATE datatype — it stores both date and time, down to the second — easy and simple. But what happens when your application goes global? Suddenly, what was “just a date” becomes a puzzle of offsets, daylight saving shifts, and unexpected conversions. One user’s “midnight” becomes another’s “yesterday,” and before you know it, you’re lost in time.

In this session, we’ll demystify the timezone maze inside the Oracle Database. We’ll take a practical look at the different datatypes — DATE, TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE, and TIMESTAMP WITH LOCAL TIME ZONE — and understand what they really store, when to use which, and what traps to avoid.

We’ll explore how Oracle manages time conversions, how session and database timezones interact, and why “UTC everywhere” isn’t always the magic fix. Expect real-world coding examples, a few “gotcha” moments, and some fun facts about timezones along the way.

This session starts with the concepts and continues with hands-on examples to help you find your way through the timezone maze. By the end, you’ll have a solid strategy for storing and displaying time correctly in multi-timezone applications — and the confidence to keep your data (and your users) perfectly in sync, no matter where in the world they are.

Learning Objectives

* Understand the differences between Oracle’s date and time datatypes (DATE, TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE, and TIMESTAMP WITH LOCAL TIME ZONE).
* Learn how to choose the right datatype and design approach for multi-timezone applications.
* Identify and avoid common pitfalls in timezone handling — from daylight saving quirks to implicit conversions — and apply best practices for reliable, global-ready systems.

APEX: Debug Like a Pro - APEX Debugger Edition

Do you also wonder how your colleague identifies that bug so quickly? Do you see him/her using debugger in APEX and once you give that a try, you’re overwhelmed by the amount of options, messages and data which is presented at you? Do you also want to know how to read and use these debug monitor and use them as a ‘real’ pro? Then this session is made for you.

To effectively identify the cause of an unexpected behaviour in your Oracle APEX application, the APEX team added some great debug options for developers. Did you know that you could enable the debugger for an active (remote) session for example? But the amount of messages can be enormous and also the various levels are confusing sometimes.

This session covers the most important information to use the APEX debugger. This is merely done by demonstrating (un)common problems in your APEX application, covering APEX, Session State and PL/SQL.

After this session, you will have a better understanding and feel comfortable using these tool yourself. From now on you’ll be able to debug like a pro!

This session is targeted at new and experienced Oracle APEX developers. Session can be given in 45 minutes.

APEX: Debug Like a Pro - JavaScript Edition

Do you also wonder how your colleague identifies that bug so quickly? Do you see him/her using the Browsers Developer Tools and once you give that a try, you’re overwhelmed by the options and the data which is presented at you? Do you also want to know how to read and use these tool and use them as a ‘real’ pro? Then this session is made for you.

To effectively identify the cause of an unexpected behaviour in your Oracle APEX application, or more specific your Dynamic Actions or other custom client-side code, the browser comes with the DevTools for developers. But this tool exists of many instruments, so when do we use what and more important why?

This session covers the most important options and instruments, what purpose do they have and when should you use each of them. This is merely done by demonstrating (un)common problems in your APEX client-side code, covering Dynamic Actions, JavaScript, JSON, HTML and CSS.

After this session, you will have a better understanding of these tool and feel comfortable using these tool yourself. From now on you’ll be able to debug like a pro!