CHAPTER 10Dates: Then, Now, and the Difference

One of Oracle's strengths is its ability to store and calculate dates, and the number of seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years between dates. In addition to basic date functions, Oracle supports a wide array of time zone–conversion functions. It also has the ability to format dates in virtually any manner you can conceive of, from the simple 01-MAY-08, to May 1st in the 782nd Year of the Reign of Louis IX. You probably won't use many of these date-formatting and computing functions, but the most basic ones will prove to be very important.

Date Arithmetic

DATE is an Oracle datatype, just as VARCHAR2 and NUMBER are, and it has its own unique properties. The DATE datatype is stored in a special ...

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