Re: date format in 7.4

On Fri, 20 Feb 2004, Silke Trissl wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have an application where users can enter the date via a web interface.
>
> Recently I upgrated my PostgreSQL version from 7.3 to 7.4.1.
>
> On 7.3 I run several tests about the format of the date and found,
> that Postgres accepts almost everything. Today I found out, that 7.4.1
> only accepts dates in the format mm-dd-yy, although the documentation
> still states the following
> #
>
> 5.
>
> Otherwise the date field ordering is assumed to follow the
> DateStyle setting: mm-dd-yy, dd-mm-yy, or yy-mm-dd. Throw an error if a
> month or day field is found to be out of range.
>
> #
> ref: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/interactive/datetime-appendix.html
>
> Does anyone know, if it is intentional to restrict it to mm-dd-yy format
> or is is just a bug of 7.4.1?

It is intentional. But, it's not as restricted as you might think.

You can set the style to one of several ways you can set it.

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/static/datatype-datetime.html

the idea behind fixing this in 7.4 was that if you set a date style of
SQL, DMY then it would be wring for the database to access a date of
3/14/04 and convert it to March 14th, since your date style said that
march 14th should come in as 14/03/04.

I.e. it's better at checking ranges and throwing out the ones that don't
fit. Better to have a problem getting the wrong data into the database
than trying to get it back out a couple years down the road.