Brendan Jurd wrote: > I'd also like to raise the topic of how conversion from text to ISO > week dates should be handled, where the user has specified a bogus > mixture of fields. Existing code basically ignores these issues; for > example, if a user were to call to_date('1998-01-01 2454050', > 'YYYY-MM-DD J') the function returns 2006-01-01, a result of setting > the year field from YYYY, then overwriting year, month and day with > the values from the Julian date in J, then setting the month and day > normally from MM and DD. > > 2006-01-01 is not a valid representation of either of the values the > user specified. Now you might say "ask a silly question, get a silly > answer"; the user shouldn't send nonsense arguments to to_date and > expect a sensible result. But perhaps the right way to respond to a > broken timestamp definition is to throw an error, rather than behave > as though everything has gone to plan, and return something which is > not correct. > > The same situation can arise if the user mixes ISO and Gregorian data; > how should Postgres deal with something like to_date('2006-250', > 'IYYY-DDD')? The current behaviour in my patch is actually to assume > that the user meant to say 'IYYY-IDDD', since "the 250th Gregorian day > of the ISO year 2006" is total gibberish. But perhaps it should be > throwing an error message.
On these questions, we have to find out how Oracle handles it, but your approach seems appropriate. -- Bruce Momjian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. + ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faq