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I have a question regarding the syntax for creating a table in Oracle

Posted on 2014-01-14

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Last Modified: 2014-01-27

Hi Experts,
I have a question regarding the syntax for creating a table in Oracle. In particular, with my date field. Please see my create table syntax below and tell me if it's correct. Thank you very much in advance.

CREATE TABLE INVOICE_TEST
(INVOICE_NO NUMBER (5),
INVOICE_DATE  DATE, ‘MM/DD/YYYY’,
CUSTOMER _ID NUMBER (5),
QTY NUMBER (6),
NET_SALES NUMBER (6));

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mrotor

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Question by:mainrotor

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3 Comments

LVL 74

Expert Comment

by:sdstuber

ID: 397796932014-01-14

do not include a format on the date column, also you had a space in the customer_id name

CREATE TABLE INVOICE_TEST
(INVOICE_NO NUMBER (5),
INVOICE_DATE DATE,
CUSTOMER_ID NUMBER (5),
QTY NUMBER (6),
NET_SALES NUMBER (6));

LVL 74

Expert Comment

by:sdstuber

ID: 397796992014-01-14

Dates (and timestamps) have their own internal format that has NOTHING to do with how you enter or present those values.

mm/dd/yyyy is a TEXT format for when you extract a date value and display it using TO_CHAR
whether implicitly or explicitly

LVL 74

Accepted Solution

by:sdstuber

sdstuber earned 500 total points

ID: 397797712014-01-14

As examples, I can insert data into the invoice_test table in multiple ways...

insert into invoice_test (invoice_date) values (:x); -- this is a bind variable of type DATE

insert into invoice_test(invoice_date) values (date '2013-01-14'); -- this is an ISO date literal

insert into invoice_test(invoice_date) values (timestamp '2013-01-14 12:34:56'); -- this is an ISO timestamp literal that will be implicitly converted to a date (losing fractional seconds which were 0 anyway in this example)

insert into invoice_test(invoice_date) values('2014-01-14 11:57:32'); -- this is an implicit conversion of a string to a date. This will work in MY session but probably not yours unless you change your default conversion format

insert into invoice_test(invoice_date) values(to_date('2014-01-14 11:57:32','yyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss')); -- this is an explicit conversion of a string to a date. This is reliable across all sessions and clients

internally the date are stored as 7 bytes and don't look anything like the text representations I've used above.

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