Oracle Database Discussions

Hey all-

I have a date column (actually, a lot of them). All our dates are stored in EST (that of the server). Now we have an app that processes everything in GMT. That is, when it inserts into the database, it creates date literals in GMT, and when it retrieves data from the database, it assumes the values are in GMT. Is there a way to instruct the Oracle client to automagically do this conversion (i.e., convert from GMT at the client into EST at the server and vice versa upon retrieval)? I have tried ALTER SESSION SET time_zone = 'GMT' but it doesn't appear to have any effect on the DATE datatype. I suspect I'll need to convert all our DATEs to TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE, but obviously would like to avoid that. Any ideas?

Thanks
Rob