Siebel Global Deployment Guide > Deploying with Global Time Zone >

Converting Historical Data to UTC

When you enable the global time zone feature, you need to convert any historical (non-UTC) time data to UTC. Perform applicable tasks in this topic if you are upgrading from a Siebel deployment of a prior version that did not use UTC, or if you have decided to convert an existing non-UTC implementation to UTC.

See also Guidelines for UTC and Non-UTC Deployments.

Converting historical data helps ensure that existing date-time values are consistent with the global time zone logic. The global time zone feature stores date-time values in the database adjusted to UTC time. If you do not convert it, your historical data will be incorrect for a UTC deployment.

For more information about how the global time zone feature processes date-time data in UTC, see About UTC Data Conversion.

Although enabling UTC is optional, it is recommended that you perform the following procedures immediately after upgrading to the current Siebel release. If you have upgraded a non-UTC deployment, you must perform the conversion steps described here before creating any new UTC date-time data—unless you have set the Universal Time Coordinated system preference to FALSE. For more information, see Guidelines for UTC and Non-UTC Deployments.

The tasks in this topic run the UTC conversion utility from the Database Configuration Wizard. For more information about running the Database Configuration Wizard, see the Siebel Installation Guide for the operating system you are using and see Siebel Database Upgrade Guide.

Before beginning to convert historical data to UTC, you must upgrade your development and production environments to the current Siebel release. For more information, see Siebel Database Upgrade Guide. For upgrades, you may also need to convert UTC delta columns, for columns that were not UTC-enabled in prior releases. For more information, see Performing UTC Delta Conversion.

Before you run the UTC conversion utility, drop all database triggers. You can re-create or reenable the triggers after the UTC conversion is complete.

NOTE:  If you are preparing external data, including appointments, for example, to be brought into a Siebel Database using Siebel EIM or Siebel EAI, you must modify the time stamp for each individual record to be consistent with UTC. For each record, the updated time stamp must be based on the applicable UTC offset. The offset must take into account both the time zone offset from UTC (for the appointment's location) and any applicable daylight savings time (DST) offset from the standard time zone that will be in effect (for the appointment's calendar date).

Process of Converting Historical Data to UTC

To convert historical data for use in an environment using UTC, perform the tasks below:

1. Reviewing About the UTC Conversion Utility
2. Preparing Your Data for Conversion to UTC
3. Running the UTC Conversion Utility
4. Reviewing the UTC Conversion Log Files

You may also need to do the following:

• Manually Launching the UTC Conversion Utility
• Performing UTC Delta Conversion