PL/SQL "localtime" function

For reasons best left unexplained, I have a bunch of Oracle (8.0.5) tables that have "date/time" fields that are NUMBER(x), and are stored as Unix "epoch" times instead of native Oracle times. I'd eventually like to migrate everything to Oracle date/time format, but that will take some careful work, because of dependencies, etc.

In the meantime, I'd like to be able to convert between Unix and Oracle times. So I'm looking for a PL/SQL function that can do this for me. Any ideas? What seems to be a bit of a holdup is that Oracle server appears not to have any idea what time zone it's in, wheras Unix servers do, and figure out daylight savings, etc. This seems to be a particularly thorny item to deal with.

Anyone have any handy PL/SQL code segments lying around to do this?

-Rick

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|                 Rick Osterberg   osterber_at_fas.harvard.edu                |


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