title: PostgreSQL/JDBC and TIMESTAMP vs. TIMESTAMPTZ
body: <p>I've been going through a lot of pain dealing with Timestamps lately with JPA. I have found that a lot of my issues have been cleared up by using TIMESTAMPTZ for my fields instead of TIMESTAMP. My server is in UTC while my JVM is in PST. It seems almost impossible with JPA to normalize on UTC values in the database when using TIMESTAMP WITHOUT TIMEZONE.</p>
  
  <p>For me I use these fields for stuff like "when was the user created", "when did they last use their device", "when was the last time they got an alert", etc. These are typically events so they are instance in time sorts of values. And because they will now by TIMESTAMPTZ I can always query them for a particular zone if I don't want them UTC. </p>
  
  <p>So my question is, for a Java/JPA/PostgreSQL server, when WOULD I want to use TIMESTAMP over TIMESTAMPTZ? What are the use cases for it? Right now I have a hard time seeing why I'd ever want to use TIMESTAMP and because of that I'm concerned that I'm not grasping its value. </p>