If you think politics does not impact IT. Think again !

Under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, passed by US Congress and then signed into law by President George W. Bush on August 8 2005, the start and end dates of Daylight Saving Time (DST) in the US have been changed, starting in 2007. so What ?
Think again, it s the database stupid. How about your timestamps ? What if you have a process that selects records from a table based on their last_update_date then massages that data and then sends an email to you customers ? All of a sudden your customers are asking themselves, why the hell am I getting this email ?

How does oracle handle Time in general:

* TIMESTAMP WITH LOCAL TIME ZONE (TSLTZ) and TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE (TSTZ) datatypes and the TZ_OFFSET function take their time zone information from Oracle’s time zone files. These files are part of the database installation, the changes to DST in the USA from 2007 are included in version 3 and higher of these time zone files. These datatypes can be used as column types or as PL/SQL types.
* The Oracle Java Virtual Machine (OJVM) uses time zone information embedded in the Oracle JVM in the database itself.
Impact of 2007 USA daylight saving changes on the Oracle database
Do I need a patch?
There are 2 database patches, one for the Oracle JVM (OJVM) and one for the time zone files. These are completely separate, and do not depend on each other in any way. The OJVM patch is only ever needed on the database side, the time zone patch might be needed on the database side and the clients.

Oracle JVM patch - for all Oracle versions 8.1.7, 9.x, 10.x (database only):

* If you have the Oracle JVM installed you are advised to apply the OJVM patch.
Time zone file patch - database side:
* This really depends on the version- I ‘d suggest you contact Oracle.

Conclusion:

I really dont recommend you take this lightly, There are patches to fix this but they all differ depending on where you have oracle installed, how it is configured etc…Instead take this seriously and treat these patches as a major release since you will experience downtime
-Thanks for reading

Oracle today announced a world record two-tier SAP® Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark result for four processor systems. Running HP-UX 11i and the mySAP(tm) ERP 2005 application on an HP Integrity rx6600 server with 4 Intel Itanium 2 1.6 GHz processors, 8 cores, 16 threads, Oracle® Database 10g achieved 2,150 SAP SD Benchmark users(1), delivering 39 percent higher throughput and 41 percent more users than Microsoft SQL Server 2005 running Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition on identical hardware(2), as measured by fully processed order lines per hour and the number of SAP SD Benchmark users.

You may ask yourself so ?

The implications of this new development are trementdous: This prooves that Oracle 10g provides the best database back-end performance for its customers. Considering that SAP has the largest market share in the ERP area, Unix/HP hungry customers will take a very close look at the result of this benmark.
You can see some of the early impacts here

P.S.: we should expect a bump in ORCL very soon - so says Mr. Jim Cramer author of: Mad Money. - one of my recommended readings.

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif.,   13-DEC-2006
Oracle announced today that it has been ranked #1 in retail in RIS News’ highly prestigious 2006 Software LeaderBoard. The RIS Software LeaderBoard compares software companies serving the retail industry in a head-to-head ranking that is based largely on retailer evaluations. Oracle’s leadership position was earned as a result of the breadth and depth of its retail offerings, customer satisfaction, and total annual sales in the retail segment.