A group of developers including myself has been charged with dealing with time zones in our database. We have been looking into using the IANA TZ Database as our source. In order to create utilities to get historical data correctly, and to future proof our code as much as possible, there were a couple of questions we have been trying to find the answers to.

If an entity breaks off from a current time zone, does the data base fork the current time zone(A) and add a new time zone(B) with time zone B having all the historical data of A?

In the INANA time zone database, the file "europe" contains information for Time Zone Europe/Dublin.

There are three lines that are proceeded with the comment "# These three lines are for when SAVE values are always nonnegative."

These lines are also preceded by comment Delimiter (Please see below).

Since the data follows the Comment Delimiter it is ignored on load. Is database supposed to load this information?

What is the purpose of these comments?

# These three lines are for when SAVE values are always nonnegative.

#                                             1:00       -              IST          1971 Oct 31 2:00u

#                                             0:00       GB-Eire GMT/IST              1996

#                                             0:00       EU          GMT/IST