just for discussion's sakes :)

nothing forbids us to have db server and appserver in different
timezones, or/and multiple appservers in different timezones running on
one db in another, etc. So having dates in appserver locale, in these
case will create "strange" result when accessing data directly (except
if you send timezone with date to postgresql, but i don't know how the
other backends might behave). That, i believe, leaves us only with
option a) for db storing.

I really think appserver should behave like other servers i dealt with,
which is: treat all dates as UTC, store them as UTC (without tz info),
and leave to the client the task of displaying dates in client locale.

lekma