Re: Year 2000 testing - aging Oracle data

Hello Steve.
If the data you have consists of a number of relationally linked tables (parents to children), then you might want to look at 'Move for Servers - Oracle' from Princeton Softech. That tool not only allows relationally intact sub-sets of data to be extracted from multiple tables, but it also allows the data to be modified when inserted to a target database. This modification 8includes the ability to age date data either linearly (adding days, weeks, months years etc) but also semantically (where business rules are applied to the aged dates so that they make logical sense to the applications. For example, if a date is aged 4 years from a Wednesday, it will end as a Saturday. The application may be expecting only weekdays. The business rule can be set to move such a date back or forward to a relevant working day.

If you want any more info, please give me a ring or e-mail me. In article <35cd1852.19920693_at_news.demon.co.uk>, David Greensmith <david_at_green1.demon.co.uk> writes
>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)

Best regards
--
  Alan Johns
  Tarragon Software Ltd - UK & Ireland Distributor for

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  Fax: 44(0)1480 436869 Received on Wed Aug 12 1998 - 08:41:46 CDT