Re: sysdate in forms

Harlin Setiadarma wrote:
>
> I have found in some docs that 'sysdate' in forms like this :
> :block.item := sysdate;
> will return client date not server date.
> I hope this information can be used....

That actually makes sense. When sysdate is used that way it is considered a local function rather than a pseudo-column of some table. That way it can get the time very efficiently from the client on which the application resides.

What does become important, however, is that the client either perform time synchronization (via an SNTP application) with the server or that both the server and the client perform time synchronization from a common source.

I recently worked with an application in which this was important. During the course of operations a variety of client error/warning messages were inserted into a table via a server-side pl/sql routine. Since the insert was done on the server side using sysdate, the time of the row insertion was that of the server. However, the table was monitored by a client-size application which only displayed messages which had been inserted in the past two hours. Because of clock drift eventually the client workstations started lagging the server time by several minutes and as a result the error messages did not become visible until the client time caught up with the server time. The people who were running the application claimed that this was a problem with oracle and that transactions were not being committed properly, etc. etc. I simply told them that they needed to keep the client and server times in sync and once they did that the problem disappeared. Received on Wed Jan 05 2000 - 06:43:23 CST