MySQL: setting time_zone in my.cnf options file

Question

In MySQL you can set a session variable called time_zone to change the timezone. This is useful e.g. when looking at timestamps from another country. Here i

Answer 1

A bit late, but this might be helpful nonetheless:

When explicitly setting the timezone, confirm that you are using the correct timezone name, keeping in mind the many have been deprecated. You can use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones to confirm.

In my case, using MySQL 5.7, the deprecated timezone name was not working when adding it below the [mysqld] in my mysqld.cnf file. Using the new timezone name, and restarting the mysql service, worked.

So for user @kev here, using America/Sao_Paulo should work, instead of using Brazil/East.