30-Mar-2016
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An issue has been brought to my attention recently that was to do with the
to_date function returning an
ORA-01840 error for certain values. This prompted an investigation which ultimately proved that it was a data issue, however I decided to put together a workaround for future reference anyway.
The error being thrown was:
That's fairly straight forward, it just means that the date I am trying to convert doesn't have enough precision for the format that I am trying to convert it to. The
SQL below demonstrates this...
Interestingly the error disappears when I add a month and day to my date value i.e.
20160101 is OK even though my format expects hours, minutes and seconds too.
My workaround takes advantage of the above find by padding the date up to 8 characters (
yyyymmdd) as required. It consists of two
rpad operations, one for the
day and one for the
month to cater for inputs of the
'yyyy' and
'yyyymm' formats.
This is the end result...
It's not the best solution but will get you out of a bind if you really need to pad dates like this.
-i
A quick disclaimer...
Although I put in a great effort into researching all the topics I cover, mistakes can happen.
If you spot something out of place, please do let me know.
All content and opinions expressed on this Blog are my own and do not represent the opinions of my employer (Oracle).
Use of any information contained in this blog post/article is subject to
this disclaimer.
Igor Kromin
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