How to get data with out having any date/timestamp columns by year wise

Question

hi,
how can i select years wise rows from tables,if that have not any date/timestamp column.

Answer 1

Well Govind it quite depends on what is the data type of that column and the format in which it is stored.
If the data type is varchar2/varchar and all the values are in a uniform format then there is no problem. All you need to use is the to_date function to convert the supplied strings to default date format and then use to_char function to only extract the YY or YYYY or RR or RRRR aspect of the data.
For example: If the column is called 'hire_date' and it's data type is varchar2 and the entries in this column are all in a uniform format, say month,date,year like January,12,1999. What you need to do is convert this string to a default date value using to_date function, like to_date(hire_date,'format_model') In the format model mention the format of the hire_date string. The out put of this function can be fed into to_char to extract the year, like to_char(output_of_to_date,'YYYY')
I hope you got what I meant. Let me know if it was of any use.