On Wed, 27 Aug 2003, Kevin Brown wrote:
There are some cases where it's extremely useful for PostgreSQL to
accept dates of any format it knows about (ambiguities should be
resolved either by looking at the current DateStyle or, failing that, by
applying the recognition in a well-defined order
And the argument bhen this was that it only leads to wrong data. As I see
it, the only time you have dates in different styles is when you get it
from a human entering dates. Then he/she will enter 01/30/03 and it is
interpreted as 2003 January 30, he/she feels happy and enters another date
in january, say 01/10/03 and now maybe it is interpreted as 2003 October
1. Of course that error is not noticed since it worked the previous time..
Yes, yes, yes. I've run into exactly that problem when scripting MS Outlook. All the dates on the twelfth of the month or earlier had the month and day transposed. It never threw an error. I checked the stuff with my own birthday (the 26th of April) so I didn't notice the problem until a user pointed it out. The moral of the story is that an error is much better than a guess. (Alternate moral: don't be like Microsoft.)
Thanks, Scott Lamb
---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: Have you searched our list archives?
http://archives.postgresql.org
