Re: Storing time values via jdbc thin driver


"Chris Seidel" <cseidel@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:49304bf2$0$31876$9b4e6d93@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
gym dot scuba dot kennedy at gmail wrote:

I am not sure I understand the question. Wouldn't you be specifying
the date and the time? In Oracle you don't have just time anyway. You
have a date and a time. You could have a string field that
represents a time. (ugh) or you could use some sort of integer to
represent the time. It looks like you have an impediance mismatch
between Java and Oracle.

Yes. Java knows Time and Date, Oracle only Date.
Java says that for time the date part must be set to 1970-01-01.
But it seems the 9.2 driver sets it to 1900-01-01.
Now all my queries are broken with a 10.2 driver.

Actually no. Oracle only knows time and date together. In Oracle there is
no stand alone time data type. There is a date data type which has a time
component. (to seconds) There is also a timestamp data type which has date
and time where the time can be parts of a second. (accuracy depends on OS,
optionally you can have a timestamp with a timezone component also) What
I have seen is some programers will request a data type from Oracle as a
string or character value. This causes all sorts of problems. (see nls
date format setting for a session) I encourage you to use native types and
not to have dates or times as strings. This is the impediance mismatch I
alluded to.

I suspect Sybrand is correct. If you go into SQLPlus and do a select on the
column in question what do you get? You will get a string representation of
the date field. (which is not a date, it is a string formatted as a date a
very different thing just like 2 and "2" are different things in Java.)

eg
select mydatefield from mytable;
or
select to_char(mydatefield,'mm/dd/yyyy') from mytable;
or
select to_char(mydatefield,'mm/dd/yyyy hh24:mi:ss') from mytable;
or
select to_char(mydatefield,'mm/dd/yyyy hh:mi:ss AM') from mytable;
etc.

At the programming level you will deal with dates (hopefully) as native
types, not a string representation of the type.

Jim


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