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From: Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>
Organization: Aglio Database Solutions
To: Thomas Good <tomg@sqlclinic.net>, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Subject: Re: Date Anomaly??
Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 08:36:34 -0700
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Thomas,

> > > Another item: if I say 'export PGDATESTYLE=3DUS' and ask psql for
> > > the date I get back an ISO date (YYYY-MM-DD).  What region of this
> > > US is this, I wonder?  Must be San Francisco (maybe Josh knows ;-)

Yeah, it's my fault.  Here in SF we're never sure what year it is, so we pu=
t=20
the year first.   <grin>

> Bottom line: there is no way to return a MM-DD-YYYY value?

Really easy, actually:
SELECT to_char(datefield, 'MM-DD-YYYY');

> I never realised that the morphology of the traditional Postgres date
> was this complex (its declension was not apparent until I used the
> INTERVAL keyword) and so I've conditioned my users to using hyphens
> as delimiters...argh.  Should have used slashes I suppose.

That's the price you pay for having "real" dates instead of the delimited=
=20
string stored by other, less sophisticated, database systems.

One of the things on my todo list (Item #18, though) is a pl/perl function=
=20
that will accept any reasonable US date and return ISO standard for insert;=
=20
I'll post it to the list when I'm done (maybe next week).

--=20
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco