Re: [INTERFACES] Bug in sortin routine?

Eilert Groeneveld <eg@tzv.fal.de> wrote:

> [...] It seems that the sorting order on dates is incorrect under
> certain circumstances: [...]  set DateStyle to 'German'; (does not
> have an effect on the problem) [...]

From the examples you gave it appears that you are still using
American date format (YYYY-MM-DD); if that is true, the lines are
ordered as they should be. If some of the date values appear to be
"correct" after manual/visual control and others not, you maybe have
inserted some of the values with American, others with German format
in use, resulting in a messed up table (and you'll have to fix it by
hand). Are you sure you've really set DateStyle correctly? I have
something like

    PGDATESTYLE=German
    export PGDATESTYLE

in my shell's .bashrc, and selecting some date values from one of my
tables gives e.g.

         datum
    ----------
    16.08.1996
    17.08.1996
    18.08.1996
    19.08.1996
    20.08.1996

that is, DD.MM.YYYY (for testing, dates with 'day' after the 12th of
the month are better suited than the others ;-). If you set
PGDATESTYLE like I did, are you sure the configuration file got
source'd? You can test the state of DateStyle with

    xxx=> show datestyle;
    NOTICE:  DateStyle is German with European conventions
    SHOW VARIABLE

from inside psql.

Hope it helps ...
viele Gr��e,
Ulf

--
======================================================================
Ulf Mehlig    <umehlig@zmt.uni-bremen.de>
              Center for Tropical Marine Ecology/ZMT, Bremen, Germany
----------------------------------------------------------------------