Re: BUG #3563: DATESTYLE feature suggestion

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.

--
Heikki Linnakangas
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com