> This is [almost] always a good thing. Obviously there's personal preference involved here, but I've never seen a system where storing the TZ turned out to be a good idea (not that I've seen all that many systems).
Assuming that time is important, perhaps Google Calendar is a good example of timezones and datetimes as strings:
I guess it depends on what you're doing with the data... if it's just "created" then it matters less. But if you're dealing with storing an event in time, it usually occurs in a place that has timezone data... boarding a plane in one timezone and landing in another, a meeting where attendees dial-in from multiple timezones and you need to alert them all at the right time and visually indicate that.
Timezones aren't trivial, and the system might store UTC under the hood, but throwing them out universally and trusting every client to get it right seems less of a good idea than handling them and taking care of that on the API side.
It looks to me like you can set what TZ you want to retrieve dates in when performing queries, with the default being the TZ associated with the calender; this is substantially different than simply returning times with whatever arbitrary TZ was used when creating the record.
Assuming that time is important, perhaps Google Calendar is a good example of timezones and datetimes as strings:
https://developers.google.com/google-apps/calendar/v3/refere...
I guess it depends on what you're doing with the data... if it's just "created" then it matters less. But if you're dealing with storing an event in time, it usually occurs in a place that has timezone data... boarding a plane in one timezone and landing in another, a meeting where attendees dial-in from multiple timezones and you need to alert them all at the right time and visually indicate that.
Timezones aren't trivial, and the system might store UTC under the hood, but throwing them out universally and trusting every client to get it right seems less of a good idea than handling them and taking care of that on the API side.