Re: Year 2000 testing - aging Oracle data

sjpbooth_at_aol.com (SJPBooth) wrote:

>Hi,
>
>As part of the testing plan for Year 2000 work, it's necessary to age dates in
>the Orcale databases so that they reflect dates in 1999, 2000, etc. It's
>important that the dates retain their interrelationships and that they conform
>to rules like not falling on a weekend or holiday.
>
>Anybody else hit this? Any ideas?
>
>Thanks,
> Steve

Our solution was to make sure that dates were incremented by a multiple of 7 (thereby maintaining the weekday relationship) and to create a table containing bank holiday dates. This table was then used to check check that the new date wasn't a bank hoiday. An anonymous PL/SQL script was found to be the best solution (committing every 1000 loops of the cursor) since some of the tables updated had a large number of rows and additionally, checking could be performed for bank holidays/weekends. It was also necessary to disable triggers and referential constraints whilst performing the update - only those referential constraints containing the date fields needed to be disabled.

Something to watch out for is whether any date information on the database is stored as non-DATE type, e.g. strings. You'll need to talk to the data analysts/developers for this.

David
David Greensmith :-)
(david_at_green1.demon.co.uk) Received on Sat Aug 08 1998 - 22:38:27 CDT