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RE: internal date value

From: Mercadante, Thomas F <thomas.mercadante_at_labor.state.ny.us>
Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2004 12:34:26 -0800
Message-ID: <F001.005DDFF7.20040123123426@fatcity.com>


Harry,

Look at the to_char function in Oracle. It will convert a date field to *any* format you want.

for example:

select to_char(date_field,'mm/dd/yyyy hh24miss') will return a date in the format as noted. You have about as many options as you probably need. You can combine as many format and functions as you think you need.

to_char translates dates to chars and to_date does the opposite - but both use the same format statements.

This should work fine for you.

And for you info - Oracle dates are stored internally based on a date going back many centuries - not just to 1968!

Good Luck

Tom Mercadante
Oracle Certified Professional

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Friday, January 23, 2004 3:09 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Thomas:

I'm a SAS guy who must pull Oracle data from the back-end DB.

SAS stores dates internally as elapsed days since Jan 1, 1960. If I request an Oracle date field, SAS creates a datetime variable, number of seconds since midnight Jan 1, 1960. Rather than use SAS functions to extract the date ( e.g. datepart function ), I'd like to push that back to Oracle if possible and create a simple date field on SAS. I can accomplish the desired effect with:

  select date_fld - to_date('01Jan1960','ddmonyyyy') as sas_date

but I was hoping there was an Oracle function to surface the internal value ( appears to be days since Jan 1, 1968 ). Presumably such a function would be more efficient.

Thanks for your help.

-----Original Message-----
Sent: January 23, 2004 2:50 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Harry,

Can you explain why you need to raw internal value? Just curious.

Tom Mercadante
Oracle Certified Professional

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Friday, January 23, 2004 1:40 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

You gather it wrong :)
Oracle stores date in 8 bytes, one for each: year, month, day, hour, min, ... etc.

Igor Neyman, OCP DBA
ineyman_at_perceptron.com

-----Original Message-----
Droogendyk, Harry
Sent: Friday, January 23, 2004 12:40 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Folks:

>From what I gather, Oracle stores dates as the number of elapsed days since
Jan 1, 1968. When I query a column of type 'DATE', it returns me the default format, dd-mon-yy. I know I can use to_char(date_col,'YYYYMMDD')
etc... to define many output formats.

What can I do to get the raw internal value of the date? i.e. today is 13172.

Thanks.
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Author: Droogendyk, Harry
  INET: Harry.Droogendyk_at_cibc.com

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Author: Igor Neyman
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Author: Mercadante, Thomas F
  INET: thomas.mercadante_at_labor.state.ny.us
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Author: Droogendyk, Harry
  INET: Harry.Droogendyk_at_CIBC.com
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Author: Mercadante, Thomas F
  INET: thomas.mercadante_at_labor.state.ny.us
Fat City Network Services    -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com
San Diego, California        -- Mailing list and web hosting services
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To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: ListGuru_at_fatcity.com (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). Received on Fri Jan 23 2004 - 14:34:26 CST

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