Oracle / JDBC: retrieving TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE value in ISO 8601 format

Question

A lot have been said (and written on SO) on parts of the subject, but not in a comprehensive, complete way, so we can have one \"ultimate, covering-it-all\" solution for eve

Answer 1

JDBC getObject(), or getTIMESTAMPTZ(), both return Oracle's TIMESTAMPTZ object, which is practically useless, because it doesn't have any conversion to Calendar (only Date, Time and Timestamp), so again, we lose TZ information.

That would be my recommendation as the only reliable way to get the information you seek.

If you are on Java SE 8 and have ojdbc8 then you can use getObject(int, OffsetDateTime.class). Be aware that when you use getObject(int, ZonedDateTime.class) you may be affected by bug 25792016.

Use Oracle's TIMESTAMPTZ java class and extract relevant value manually from its internal (documented) byte array structure (i.e. implement my own toString() method which Oracle forgot to implement there). This is risky if Oracle changes internal structure (unlikely) and demands relatively complicated function to implement and maintain.

This is what we ultimately went with until bug free JSR-310 support is available in the Oracle JDBC driver. We determined this was the only reliable way to get the information we want.