Time Zones in Rails using Postgres

It appears that by default Rails creates it's timestamps in Postgres using timestamps without time zone information.  This means that if you're working directly with the database, using psql for example, and want to see local time representations you'll have to do something like this.

	SELECT
	users.fname,
	users.lname,
	TIMEZONE('UTC', users.created_at) AT TIME ZONE 'CST6CDT'
	FROM
	users;

view raw gistfile1.sql hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Specifically notice that I'm using the TIMEZONE function to re-cast the column to a timestamp with timezone.  Since the columns implied timezone is 'UTC' that's what's used.  Now that we have a timestamp with timezone we can convert that to local time using the "AT TIME ZONE" syntax.