[comp.databases] oracle sqlforms dates

don@seila.UUCP (Don Kossman) (05/08/88)

we are going through some agony trying to find an efficient way,
using oracle forms, to display and update time-of-day within
oracle DATE fields.

as you well know if you've brushed up against
this one, the default display format is Month-day-year, although
the DATE type actually holds complete time-of-day as well.  
in addition, a "feature" of sqlforms is that the time-of-day
gets quietly reset to 12:00 whenever the row containing a date
field is updated.

based on advice from the friendly folks at oracle customer support,
our solution is to use several triggers: pre-query to convert the
date to date/time; post-query to re-convert it; plus validation
triggers to check for valid times within the time field.

this works, but slows things down by a factor of 5; a query that
takes 2 seconds with the "vanilla" form now takes 12 ....

we do NOT want to use a separate field to hold time-of-day, as
we are doing LOTS of sql selects comparing dates and it gets
just too messy dealing with all the combinations of dates and times.

if anyone has solved this or has a bright idea please enlighten...
thanks !

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Don Kossman, SEI Information Technology, Los Angeles
usenet	: ... sun!tsunami!seila!don