---
title: "Room + Date / Time"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/room-date-time-imorzexci
source_url: https://chrisbanes.me/posts/room-time
type: article
source: "Chris Banes"
published: 2026-07-05T07:13:56.212Z
updated: 2026-07-05T07:18:09.377Z
tags: ["sqlite"]
reading_time: 8
upvotes: 0
comments: 0
language: en
---

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# Room + Date / Time

**[Chris Banes](https://daily.dev/sources/chrisbanes)** · 8 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

Android Room database does not natively support timezone-aware date/time storage. The canonical approach of mapping java.util.Date to Long loses timezone information. A better solution uses the ThreeTen-BP library's OffsetDateTime class with custom TypeConverters that serialize values as ISO 8601 strings (e.g., 2013-10-07T17:23:19.540-04:00) stored as SQLite TEXT. This preserves full timezone data. For correct chronological ordering in queries, SQLite's built-in datetime() function must be used instead of plain string sorting, since lexicographic ordering breaks when rows have different UTC offsets.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://chrisbanes.me/posts/room-time>

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Tags: [#sqlite](https://daily.dev/tags/sqlite)

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