Re: BUG #3563: DATESTYLE feature suggestion

Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
> Randolf Richardson wrote:
>
>
>> After convincing clients and colleagues to switch from Oracle (and others)
>> to PostgreSQL, an issue that comes up is the need to customize DATESTYLE.
>> Because this isn't possible, the developers who were against the move to
>> PostgreSQL make it political and recommended work-around solutions such as
>> using to_char() or implementing a view for each table that contain
>> TIMESTAMP[TZ]s is very difficult to argue with management because a lot of
>> time is required to implement these items.
>>
>> In a future version, to solve this problem, an additional DATESTYLE option
>> that uses the same rules as the to_char() function for date formatting would
>> solve this problem.  Here's an example:
>>
>> SET DATESTYLE = 'Custom YYYY-Mon-DD';
>>
>> This feature would not only resolve this particular political strife, but
>> would also solve many other problems, including simplifying coding for raw
>> SQL output serving as reports (e.g., users still get confused about dates
>> like "2007-06-03," wondering if they refer to June 3rd, or March 6th).
>>
>> I'm hoping that this suggestion will be an easy one to implement.
>>
>
> Probably wouldn't be too hard.
>
> I'm curious, what datestyle do you need? The current datestyle GUC
> variable provides the most common ones already.
>
The issue is output, not input.

SET datestyle='dmy';
SELECT '03-03-2004'::date

Will return '2007-03-03', not 03-03-2004  as is the set datestyle.

Regards

Russell