Re: SV: Date Format: Mystery

From: Jonathan Gennick <jonathan_at_gennick.com>
Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2004 05:44:30 -0800
Message-ID: <F001.005DE74F.20040130054430@fatcity.com>

Friday, January 30, 2004, 2:24:25 AM, Jesper Haure Norrevang (jhn.aida_at_cbs.dk) wrote: JHN> Certainly som conversion is going on here. This might be the reason why JHN> there has been confusion about 7 or 8 bytes in a DATE datatype.

That's really interesting, that switch between 7 and 8 bytes. Oracle's docs, I believe in the OCI manual, do show a seven-byte format.  

JHN> To answer your question, it is possible to deal with fractions of seconds,
JHN> byt you need to use the TIMESTAMP datatype. The function SYSTIMESTAMP could
JHN> be useful. Be aware that Oracle supports 9 decimals, but not all hardware
JHN> platforms do.

Related to this, just because a platform returns, say, six digits, does not mean it increments on that last digit. Instead of:

    21.000001 seconds
    21.000002 seconds
    ...

The best your platform does might look like:

    21.000001 seconds
    21.000801 seconds
    21.001601 seconds
    ...

I just made these numbers up, but hopefully they give the idea.

I'm still curious about that seven versus eight byte thing with SYSDATE.

Best regards,

Jonathan Gennick --- Brighten the corner where you are http://Gennick.com * 906.387.1698 * mailto:jonathan@gennick.com

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Author: Jonathan Gennick
  INET: jonathan_at_gennick.com

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