defining variables or constants within database.

We would like to have a means to alter the system date within our application without changing the hardware datetime. Currently we are doing so via a Oracle function we wrote to simply return sysdate + some number of days offset. This way we have a soft date that can be altered realtime if a batch job is late, etc.

The problem with this solution is that the performance of our querries suffers rather dramatically when using a function. Since we have a considerable amount of effective/expiration logic we find that most of the system refers to this date function.  Hence much of the system is being adversly effected by the performance problem.

If anyone has a better alternative to maintaining a "soft" date, one that would not be such a performance drain, we would love to here it.

I have thought of perhaps using an environment variable, or overriding the value of sysdate. Both of which I don't know how to do, or even if possible within Oracle.

Any thoughts would be great.

Michael Wood
maw_at_iac.net Received on Wed Jul 10 1996 - 00:00:00 CEST