The database commonly used for named zones such as Europe/Paris is the tz database.
The tz database is a collaborative record of the world’s time-zone rules, including changes caused by daylight saving time, political decisions, and historical shifts. Software can use an identifier such as Europe/Paris rather than relying on a fragile abbreviation or a fixed UTC offset.
Its names follow an Area/Location pattern. Europe/Paris identifies the rules associated with Paris, while America/New_York identifies a different set of clock rules. This matters because a location can switch between standard time and daylight time, and those changes can vary by country and year.
The database is also called tzdata, zoneinfo, or the IANA time-zone database. It is widely used in operating systems, programming languages, databases, and mobile platforms. “UTC+1” alone is not an equivalent: it describes an offset, but not the historical and future rules attached to a particular place.