The Japanese Emporer and Oracle..

Hi all,

Not really a question, more an odd bit of Oracle trivia..

I have been working a lot with application development on Oracle8i and the Japanese imperial calendar (nls_calendar = 'japanese imperial') lately.
In the Japanese calendar the years are measured from the start of the reign of the current emporer ie. 2002 = Year 14 of the 'Heisei' era - the previous era went up to 'Shouwa' 63 (I think). When the emporer passes on then from that day on it is Year 1 of the next era. (Oracle knows when previous reigns started and finished, but of course but it can't know when the current reign will end so it presumes all future dates are still in the same era.)

Thinking about this, I realised that the day the emporer dies Oracle will have to issue a 'commemerative' patch to update everyone's databases and fix the date at which the current reign/era ended. Bizarre. There must be other Oracle-supported regional calendar formats which work in a similar way. Out of curiosity, has this sort of thing ever happened to anyone else while using other calendar formats??

Daniel Received on Mon Dec 09 2002 - 01:28:17 CST