[Info-Ingres] Formatting dates on insert or update - Help required please

[Karl & Betty Schendel]

At 10:10 PM +1200 8/2/07, Richard Harden wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>
>I have a small database procedure that on insert into tableA, it inserts a related row into tableB
>Where currently it uses
>
><snipped for brevity of course>
>Insert into std_activity_references (:std_activity_no,'WP Rev Date',char(date('today'),10) )
><snip...>
>
>Where because ii_date_format is set to Multinational4, the dates thus inserted are in the form dd/mm/yyyy.
>
>Is there any simple way of formating the dates so that it is inserted into the record in the format dd-mmm-yyyy

Dates don't have any format when stored.  They are stored as a
binary structure giving the date, and time as GMT if there's a
time part.

Dates are displayed according to the II_DATE_FORMAT setting,
and at present that's almost your only option.  You can
also cast the dates to varchar within an SQL query, and
when that's done, the conversion is under the control of
the SET DATE_FORMAT statement, which might be undocumented;
I haven't looked.  The server date format is initialized to
the II_DATE_FORMAT when you start a session, but you can
change it with SET DATE_FORMAT.  That only affects date
conversions done within the server, though, not outside
conversions which are done when you retrieve a date as a
date type.

Karl