Help with some date functions.

Question

I need to write code that allows a person to, at the beginning of a year, cancel all records that pertained to the prior year.
E.g., on 1/5/11, all records for the 2010 year would need to be cancelled by inserting the cancellation_date as the last date of that prior year.
So I thought the best way to do this would be with this function:
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION TEST2
RETURN DATE
AS
v_prior_year     CHAR(4);
v_last_second_string VARCHAR2(20);
v_last_second_date DATE;
BEGIN
-- Extract the year from the SYSDATE, convert it to a number, subtract 1, convert that year back to a string.
v_prior_year := TO_CHAR(TO_NUMBER(TO_CHAR (SYSDATE, 'YYYY'))-1);
-- Construct a string consisting of the last second of that year.
v_last_second_string := '31-DEC-' || v_prior_year || ' 235959';
-- Convert that string back to a date.
v_last_second_date := TO_DATE(v_last_second_string, 'DD-MON-YYYY HH24MISS');
RETURN v_last_second_date;
END Test2;
I was just wondering if there is a shorter way to do this?
Thanks.

Answer 1

Prohan wrote:
Tubby:
You're saying that truncating the YYYY of the sysdate brings you to midnight of the first day of that year?Yes ... the absolute beginning of the year.
TUBBY_TUBBZ?select trunc(sysdate, 'YYYY') from dual;
TRUNC(SYSDATE,'YYYY'
01-JAN-2010 12 00:00
1 row selected.
Elapsed: 00:00:00.01
TUBBY_TUBBZ?