Changing timezone on an existing Django project
database-agnostic, django, python, pytz, timezone
Solution
I would do a mass update to the database tables by adding or subtracting hours to/from the datetime fields.
Something like this works in SQL Server, and adds 2 hours to the date:
update tblName set date_field = dateadd("hh", 2, data_field)
Problem
Like an idiot, I completely overlooked the timezone setting when I first built an application that collects datetime data. It wasn't an issue then because all I was doing was "time-since" style comparisons and ordering. Now I need to do full reports that show the actual datetime and of course, they're all stored at America/Chicago (the ridiculous Django default). So yes. I've got a medium sized database full of these dates that are incorrect. I want to change `settings.TIME_ZONE` to `'UTC'` but that doesn't help my existing data. What's the best (read: easiest, quickest) way to convert all that Model data en-masse? (All the data is from within the past two months, so there's thankfully no DST to convert) This project is currently on SQLite but I have another project on PostgreSQL with a similar problem that I might want to do the same on before DST kicks in... So ideally a DB-agnostic answer.