To be pedantic, Oracle doesn't care what the date format is, it will always sort properly on dates regardless of format.
Sorting within perl is another matter: put the year first. Jared On Sunday 26 January 2003 23:46, Michael A Chase wrote: > On Mon, 27 Jan 2003 00:24:58 -0700 (MST) Doug Hughes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I've got some fields in an oracle table where the internal format > > is date. I'm currently using a select * type query to return > > all the colums of the table (36), and the date fields come back > > as 'MM/DD/YYYY'. > > I could enumerate every column and for each data field do > > a select to_char(field,'MM/DD/YYYY HH24:MI:SS'), but that > > seems rather tedious and I was thinking there must be a better > > way. Is there some way to do the equivalent of an alter system > > to set the NLS_DATE_FORMAT for retrieving date fields? > > You'll need to check the fine Oracle SQL manual to be sure, but I > think "ALTER SESSION SET NLS DATE FORMAT TO 'YYYY/MM/DD HH24:MI:SS'" > or something similar would do what you want. I recommend putting the > year first since that makes sorting and parsing easier.
