How To Format Sysdate

Question

How do you format sysdate? I want the results to be in date format, but I only want the date itself without the time added as
6/14/2010
The To_Date function doesn't seem to work as it converts a string to a date and sysdate isn't a string?
Thanks for any help..

Answer 1

user12296489 wrote:
Turns out that I can specify to change the format from text to date when I import the data into access. So, after using To_Char to save the data in mm/dd/yy text format, I can import that, changing it to date format upon the import..That sounds like the correct thing to do.
You have to remember, when you talk about "format", you are talking about how something is displayed or output and that means you are talking about strings. Only character based datatypes are strings (VARCHAR2, CLOB) and the other datatypes are internal representations that have to be formatted to strings to be displayed.
For examples, if I look at the string 'FRED'...
SQL> select 'FRED', dump('FRED') as dmp from dual;
'FRE DMP
FRED Typ=96 Len=4: 70,82,69,68You can see that it's stored internally as 4 bytes each of which are the ascii values of the 4 characters in the string. There's no formatting needed as it's already a direct representation of the ASCII characters needed to display it.
However, if I look at sysdate...
SQL> select sysdate, dump(sysdate) as dmp from dual;
SYSDATE             DMP
15/06/2010 08:28:04 Typ=13 Len=8: 218,7,6,15,8,28,4,0Whilst it displayes in DD/MM/YYYY HH24:MI:SS format, the internal storage of it is something completely different. It's made up of 8 bytes of data that sort of (but not fully) represent the number parts of the date, but contain non of the formatting that would display it as it appeared to me.
The format for the date comes from my local session settings, which tell it how to format it as a string. I can change this...
SQL> alter session set nls_date_format='DD-MON-YYYY';
Session altered.
SQL> select sysdate, dump(sysdate) as dmp from dual;
SYSDATE     DMP
15-JUN-2010 Typ=13 Len=8: 218,7,6,15,8,32,44,0Now the date is displayed differently, but internally it's still represented by 8 bytes, that hasn't changed.
So, if you want to format dates, or numbers, you need to use the TO_CHAR function and specify the format it should be displayed in. You can use the NLS settings, but they are session specific and you would need to be careful using them. It's always better to be explicit about the format you want using TO_CHAR instead.