RE: Different date formats between thin and thick clients
- From: "Dunbar, Norman (Capgemini)" <norman.dunbar.capgemini@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "oracle-l" <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2011 07:46:57 -0000
Morning all,
sorry, I'm late to the party again! ;-(
>> | using oci 9.2 | using thin
>> NLS_DATE_FORMAT | Mon DD YYYY HH24:MI:SS | DD-MON-RR
This is fair enough, but are we trying to "fix the database" when we
should be fixing the code?
Ok, I realise that fixing the code will cost a lot more that attempting
to set a parameter or two on the database and hope that it works,
however, I suspect that some or all of the application code relating to
date handling is not using TO_DATE() (or TO_CHAR() calls as appropriate.
One thing I learned many years ago when writing Oracle apps was that
you "never mess with dates" and always always use TO_DATE() and
TO_CHAR() calls when translating plus, you always supply a format string
too - to be sure that the value you are passing will be stored
correctly.
We had customers all over Europe and things were fine - the default date
format worked ok, as soon as we started trading in the USA, it went
belly up due to the customers there setting a [strange!} date format of
'MM/DD/YYYYY ...' so our nice little expectation that dates would be
just fine fell apart quite quickly.
My job was to find all date handling code and fix it! Because of this, I
know the pain involved with my initial suggestion above, but it really
needs to be done by the sound of things. You simply cannot rely on the
fact that the customers will all have the same default date format, nor
can you rely on the fact that that format will be compatible with your
application.
Other than that, I don't suppose there's any way that the application
can issue an ALTER SESSION SET NLS_DATE_FORMAT = 'something suitable' to
get over the problem in the mean time?
Cheers,
Norm.
Norman Dunbar
Contract Senior Oracle DBA
Capgemini Database Team (EA)
Internal : 7 28 2051
External : 0113 231 2051
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