Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
Randolf Richardson wrote:
After convincing clients and colleagues to switch from Oracle (and others)
to PostgreSQL, an issue that comes up is the need to customize DATESTYLE.
Because this isn't possible, the developers who were against the move to
PostgreSQL make it political and recommended work-around solutions such as
using to_char() or implementing a view for each table that contain
TIMESTAMP[TZ]s is very difficult to argue with management because a lot of
time is required to implement these items.
In a future version, to solve this problem, an additional DATESTYLE option
that uses the same rules as the to_char() function for date formatting would
solve this problem. Here's an example:
SET DATESTYLE = 'Custom YYYY-Mon-DD';
This feature would not only resolve this particular political strife, but
would also solve many other problems, including simplifying coding for raw
SQL output serving as reports (e.g., users still get confused about dates
like "2007-06-03," wondering if they refer to June 3rd, or March 6th).
I'm hoping that this suggestion will be an easy one to implement.
Probably wouldn't be too hard.
I'm curious, what datestyle do you need? The current datestyle GUC
variable provides the most common ones already.
The issue is output, not input.
SET datestyle='dmy';
SELECT '03-03-2004'::date
Will return '2007-03-03', not 03-03-2004 as is the set datestyle.
Regards
Russell
---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to
choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not
match
