Storing Date/Time and Timestamps in UTC with JPA and Hibernate

In Java Persistence API (JPA) and Hibernate, managing date/time and timestamp values across different time zones can be a challenge. To ensure consistent storage and retrieval of UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) time, it is crucial to configure the framework appropriately.

Consider the annotated JPA entity provided:

public class Event {
    @Id
    public int id;

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

To store the date/time in UTC time zone, the hibernate.jdbc.time_zone property can be configured as follows:

Using Properties.xml

In the properties.xml JPA configuration file, add the following property:

Using Spring Boot

If using Spring Boot, add this property to your application.properties file:

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

With this configuration, dates and timestamps will be stored and retrieved in UTC time zone. For example, if the date is 2008-02-03 9:30am Pacific Standard Time (PST), it will be stored as 2008-02-03 5:30pm UTC in the database. When retrieved, it will be interpreted as UTC time, so 5:30pm UTC remains 5:30pm UTC even after conversion to another time zone.