RE: Using 12/31/9999 in a date field

From: <Jay.Miller_at_tdameritrade.com>
Date: Wed, 18 Dec 2013 17:33:12 +0000
Message-ID: <0D8F4CAC0F9D3C4AACC63F50FD9957F72791C0A5_at_PRDCTWPEMLMB31.prod-am.ameritrade.com>

My main concern is how the optimizer will deal with it. Certainly functionally it can work fine.

Jay Miller
Sr. Oracle Database Administrator
201.369.8355
From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Coll-Barth, Michael Sent: Wednesday, December 18, 2013 11:16 AM To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: RE: Using 12/31/9999 in a date field

I've always used this as an end date as opposed to nulls. While I can deal with nulls just fine ( I prefer them, especially for statistics ), but when dealing with users, I find too often that code fails to produce the desired result set due to not properly taking nulls into account.

For me, it becomes a question of which do you prefer; a little ugly or crap results?

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Jay.Miller_at_tdameritrade.com Sent: Wednesday, December 18, 2013 10:53 AM To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Using 12/31/9999 in a date field

I've always told people to avoid this like the plague but I'm now on a call with a developer who says Oracle in general and Tom Kyte specifically have changed their position on this and they now recommend it.

Has anyone heard anything about this or have a white paper or link that I can review? Or if it still isn't a good idea (I have a hard time imagining it is but maybe the optimizer has gotten a lot smarter) have a link showing the opposite more recent than the 2008 Tom Kyte article?

Thanks!

Jay Miller

--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l

Received on Wed Dec 18 2013 - 18:33:12 CET