java - How to store date/time and timestamps in UTC time zone with JPA and Hibernate

Question

How can I configure JPA/Hibernate to store a date/time in the database as UTC (GMT) time zone? Consider this annotated JPA entity:

public class Event {
    @Id
    public int id;

    @Temporal(TemporalType.TIMESTAMP)
    public java.util.Date date;
}

If the date is 2008-Feb-03 9:30am Pacific Standard Time (PST), then I want the UTC time of 2008-Feb-03 5:30pm stored in the database. Likewise, when the date is retrieved from the database, I want it interpreted as UTC. So in this case 530pm is 530pm UTC. When it's displayed it will be formatted as 9:30am PST.

Answer 1

Since Hibernate 5.2, you can now force the UTC time zone by adding the following configuration property into the properties.xml JPA configuration file:

<property name="hibernate.jdbc.time_zone" value="UTC"/>

If you're using Spring Boot, then add this property to your application.properties file:

spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.jdbc.time_zone=UTC