I've always used this as an end date as opposed to nulls. While I can deal with nulls just fine ( I prefer them, especially for statistics ), but when dealing with users, I find too often that code fails to produce the desired result set due to not properly taking nulls into account. For me, it becomes a question of which do you prefer; a little ugly or crap results? From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Jay.Miller@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Wednesday, December 18, 2013 10:53 AM To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Using 12/31/9999 in a date field I've always told people to avoid this like the plague but I'm now on a call with a developer who says Oracle in general and Tom Kyte specifically have changed their position on this and they now recommend it. Has anyone heard anything about this or have a white paper or link that I can review? Or if it still isn't a good idea (I have a hard time imagining it is but maybe the optimizer has gotten a lot smarter) have a link showing the opposite more recent than the 2008 Tom Kyte article? Thanks! Jay Miller