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Oracle gem of the day: converting epoch seconds 3 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • I know I've searched for Oracle epoch seconds before and come up with something similar to what you are using. I did it again today when I saw this post and ran across something bizarre (yet interesting): The story behind the Oracle DATE datatype [dizwell.com].
  • I dealt with this issue a long time ago (Oracle 7 or 8, IIRC), and I haven't had to deal with Oracle in quite a while, so forgive me if my examples seem a bit hazy, or if Oracle's handling of these issues has improved.

    In my experience, Oracle doesn't understand time zones, daylight savings adjustments, leap seconds, or anything else that makes dealing with date/times easy. So, the shortcut I eventually came up with was to use seconds from "now" as the epoch. That way you can deal with the various other is

    • Today Oracle understands time zones and daylight savings time if you use the TIMESTAMP WITH TIMEZONE data type, which is sort of a superset of the DATE datatype. There is also a plain TIMESTAMP datatype that has some features beyond DATE but does not do timezones.

      The only time I really had to mess with this was when I had Log4perl logging to a database table, and I demanded that the timestamp field be a TIMESTAMP WITH TIMEZONE in UTC time, with UTC as the TIMEZONE value. Somewhere back in my journal I h

      --
      J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
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