SQL Server - Convert date field to UTC

Question

I have recently updated my system to record date/times as UTC as previously they were storing as local time.

I now need to convert all the local stored date/times to

Answer 1

Depending on how far back you need to go, you can build a table of daylight savings times and then join the table and do a dst-sensitive conversion. This particular one converts from EST to GMT (i.e. uses offsets of 5 and 4).

select createdon, dateadd(hour, case when dstlow is null then 5 else 4 end, createdon) as gmt
from photos
left outer join (
          SELECT {ts '2009-03-08 02:00:00'} as dstlow, {ts '2009-11-01 02:00:00'} as dsthigh
UNION ALL SELECT {ts '2010-03-14 02:00:00'} as dstlow, {ts '2010-11-07 02:00:00'} as dsthigh
UNION ALL SELECT {ts '2011-03-13 02:00:00'} as dstlow, {ts '2011-11-06 02:00:00'} as dsthigh
UNION ALL SELECT {ts '2012-03-11 02:00:00'} as dstlow, {ts '2012-11-04 02:00:00'} as dsthigh
UNION ALL SELECT {ts '2013-03-10 02:00:00'} as dstlow, {ts '2013-11-03 02:00:00'} as dsthigh
UNION ALL SELECT {ts '2014-03-09 02:00:00'} as dstlow, {ts '2014-11-02 02:00:00'} as dsthigh
UNION ALL SELECT {ts '2015-03-08 02:00:00'} as dstlow, {ts '2015-11-01 02:00:00'} as dsthigh
UNION ALL SELECT {ts '2016-03-13 02:00:00'} as dstlow, {ts '2016-11-06 02:00:00'} as dsthigh
UNION ALL SELECT {ts '2017-03-12 02:00:00'} as dstlow, {ts '2017-11-05 02:00:00'} as dsthigh
UNION ALL SELECT {ts '2018-03-11 02:00:00'} as dstlow, {ts '2018-11-04 02:00:00'} as dsthigh
    ) dst
    on createdon >= dstlow and createdon < dsthigh