Hmmm... I'm confused. It works for us. When I make this change in
postmaster.conf for our v7.2 install, it has the desired effect. Perhaps
this file is specific to the Debian package. Is postmaster.conf generally
used in all distributions?
Here is the documentation I found in that file:
# How (by default) to present dates to the frontend; the user can override
# this setting for his own session. The choices are:
# Style Date Datetime
# ----------------------------------------------------------------
# ISO 1999-07-17 1999-07-17 07:09:18+01
# SQL 17/07/1999 17/07/1999 07:09:19.00 BST
# POSTGRES 17-07-1999 Sat 17 Jul 07:09:19 1999 BST
# GERMAN 17.07.1999 17.07.1999 07:09:19.00 BST
#
# It is also possible to specify month-day or day-month ordering in date
# input and output. Americans tend to use month-day; Europeans use
# day-month. Specify European or nonEuropean. Separate the two parameters
# by a comma with no spaces
PGDATESTYLE=SQL,nonEuropean
-Nick
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tom Lane [mailto:tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2002 8:39 AM
> To: nickf@ontko.com
> Cc: Martin Teoh; pgsql-admin@postgresql.org
> Subject: Re: [ADMIN] set permanent date style
>
>
> "Nick Fankhauser" <nickf@ontko.com> writes:
> > in postmaster.conf, add a line that looks something like this:
> > PGDATESTYLE=ISO,European
>
> I do not believe that will work in any released version. It will work
> to set PGDATESTYLE as an environment variable in the postmaster's
> environment, however.
>
> As of 7.3 it will be possible to set DateStyle in postgresql.conf,
> but up through 7.2 DateStyle is specially handled and isn't in the
> set of variables that postgresql.conf knows about :-(
>
> For the particular problem at hand, adding -e to the postmaster's
> command line switches might have been enough ...
>
> regards, tom lane
>