Re: to_char put into a date?

On Thu, 20 Sep 2001 07:23:25 GMT, Matthias Gresz <nospam_at_newsranger.com> wrote:

>You should use time_processed = sysdate instead of the to_char-conversion.

I understand that. I was surprised when I saw that the person had attempted to stick a to_char (sysdate, 'blah') into a date field, and I was further surprised when I saw that Oracle ALLOWED that to be done without returning some sort of error.

>At
>the moment you seem to be lucky, that the box you ran the population from has
>NLS_DATE set in a way that it understands 'MM/DD/YYYY HH24:MI:SS'. May be it's
>setting is 'DD/MM/YYYY HH24:MI:SS' so you will run into problems with some
>dates.

I don't believe this is the case - like I said, I can no longer treat it as a date field, I must treat it as a char field, even though the column itself is a date, not a char or varchar or whatever. That is, in order to treat the stuff that I get out of the date field as a date, I now have to do a to_date on it. Since I specify the format in the to_date, I don't think there's an issue like you imply where DD and MM could potentially get confused.

>Don't know what the programmer thought about converting date to char to store it
>in a date field.

I know, but unfortunately it's there.

Bob Vesterman. Received on Thu Sep 27 2001 - 15:56:04 CDT