[Firebird-devel] Error "Invalid time zone region" with syntactically questionable timestamp string

[Mark R. <ma...@la...>]

Today I ran the Jaybird tests on Firebird 4 for the first time since the 
timezone changes where merged. A test that previously worked (despite a 
typo), now yields an error

java.sql.SQLException: Invalid time zone region [SQLState:HY000, ISC 
error code:335544382]

This can be reproduced with:

CREATE TABLE T2 (C10 TIMESTAMP);
commit;
insert into T2 values ('2001-JAN-6:8:00:03.1223');

This query has a syntax 'error', a `:` between date and time instead of 
a space (it works with '2001-JAN-6 8:00:03.1223'). But this syntax error 
has worked fine for the past 17 years; it was introduced in a commit in 
Jaybird on 2001-06-29.

I'm OK with a stricter syntax, but then I would expect another error (eg 
a "conversion error from string "2001-JAN-6:8:00:03.1223"" or similar), 
as this error is just confusing. If this is an intentional change, it 
should also be explicitly mentioned in the release notes.

This is possibly related to topic "[Firebird-devel] Valid date or not" 
from 21st of February 2018.

The firebird.log contains the following error:

RAMONA	Thu Dec 27 10:20:45 2018
	ICU error retrieving the system time zone: -128. Fallbacking to 
displacement.

Interestingly, this error also occurs during the build, as the log also 
contains errors from the build server during the build process, for example:

FBCOMPILEWIN	Wed Dec 26 22:23:25 2018
	ICU error retrieving the system time zone: -128. Fallbacking to 
displacement.

This raises a number of questions:

1. Why does this specific error occur when non-timezone types are used?
2. If indeed we no longer allow this syntactically questionable format, 
would it be possible to instead raise a different (less confusing) error?
3. What is the underlying cause of the error logged ("ICU error 
retrieving the system time zone: -128.")? Is there a problem with 
timezone support on Windows?
4. Errors logged during build should be fixed, right?

And a nitpick: "Fallbacking" should be "Falling back"

Mark
-- 
Mark Rotteveel