[GENERAL] inevitability of to_date() when converting representations which don't represent whole timestamps

2017-03-29 Thread Shaun Cutts
When being asked to convert a day of the week, the to_date() function returns the same day ('0001-01-01 BC’) no matter which day is converted: # select to_date(‘Monday’, ‘Day’) '0001-01-01 BC’ # select to_date(‘Tuesday’, ‘Day’) '0001-01-01 BC’ However, if it were to return a date that was that

[GENERAL] maximum "target list" (maximum columns)

2016-06-16 Thread Shaun Cutts
The opinion of database developers is that using more than 1664 columns is bad design, so that the current maximum number of columns is not onerous. When I simply built applications on top of databases, I was of the same opinion. However, now my job is to perform some sort of analysis on data fr