> 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.
That's great! I'm guessing that this is due to the work already done with the to_char() function. > I'm curious, what datestyle do you need? The current datestyle GUC > variable provides the most common ones already. The datestyle I need is "YYYY-Mon-DD" so that reports can easily be generated that show dates like 2007-Aug-22. For people reading the output, there will be absolutely no confusion about what the date is. But that's the format that I'm interested in (and I deal with many others who really like it as well); I think that using the same rules as to_char() would potentially serve everyone better than supplying a special datestyle just to match my preference. Thanks. Randolf Richardson - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada http://www.randolf.richardson.tw/ "Radio-active cats have 18 half-lives." ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster