Date Functions

Characteristics

The Oracle database stores dates in an internal format representing the century, year, month, day, hours, minutes, and seconds. For example, if today is October 6, 2005, at 07:10 in the morning, the current date is stored internally as October 6, 2005, 07:10:06.

The default display and input format for any date is DD-MON-YY. DD stands for the day of the month, MON stands for the first three letters of the month name, and YY stands for the year (which also includes the century). Valid Oracle dates are between January 1, 4712 B.C., and December 31, A.D. 9999.

Common Date Functions

Date functions enhance your ability to calculate information about dates. Common DATE functions are listed in the table below. These functions operate on DATE data types and return date, date-time, or number values.

SYSDATE Function

SYSDATE is a special date function that returns the current date and time. You can use the function in any SQL statement.

SYSDATE is a function that contains no arguments. You can use SYSDATE just as you use a column name. The SYSDATE is displayed for every row in the table used.