I am writing to solicit suggestions for handling problems with existing
applications, associated with the Year 2000. Clearly, the "DATE"
type in Oracle7 handles dates beyond 1999. Our problem stems from a
large number of existing applications that contain embedded SQL
statements using only two digits for the year. A simple example would
be something like the following, where SOME_DATE is defined as being
of type DATE:
update SOME_TABLE set SOME_DATE = to_date ('15-APR-01', 'DD-MON-YY)
where ID ='12345';
The date in this example, will be stored as April 15, 1901, not as
April 15, 2001. I realize the developers of our applications were
very short-sighted! To fix this kind of problem, are there better
solutions than going into every application and modifying the relevant
SQL statements? I have considered using triggers to inspect dates after
insertions and updates, storing years from '00' to '50', as years 2000
to 2050. Are there known problems with this approach? What other
suggestions do you have? We are currently running Oracle 7.2.3 under
HP/UX 10.01 and will upgrade to 7.3 upon availability.
Thanks in advance!
- Andy Zitelli, Silicon Systems Inc.
Received on Mon Apr 15 1996 - 00:00:00 CEST