ORA-01841 Converting SQL Server DateTime to Oracle Date

Question

I have Oracle 11gR2 x64 running on my Win7 Enterprise x64 personal system. I'm trying to convert the TSQL to create a database in SQL Server 2008 Express for my C# class to Oracle, and I've run into a "interesting" problem loading date data.
The SQL Server 2008 TSQL InvoiceDate column in the Invoices table has datatype DATETIME:
*[InvoiceDate] [datetime] NOT NULL,*
which Oracle does not support. The Oracle InvoiceDate column in the MMAB_Invoices table has datatype DATE:
InvoiceDate DATE NOT NULL,
The fun begins with the TSQL INSERT statements (for example):
INSERT [dbo].[Invoices] ([InvoiceID], [CustomerID], [InvoiceDate], [ProductTotal], [SalesTax], [Shipping], [InvoiceTotal]) VALUES (18, 20, CAST(0x00009CFD00000000 AS DateTime), 151.0000, 11.3300, 6.2500, 168.5800)
As you can see, whoever wrote the load script thought it would be totally awesome to convert hex (binary?) data to generate a date, instead of using data readable by a human being.
BTW, the date generated is 2010-01-13 00:00:00.000.
After Reading The Fabulous Manual and searching the OTN Discussion Fora, what I came up with is
INSERT INTO MMAB_Invoices (CustomerID, InvoiceDate, ProductTotal, SalesTax, Shipping, InvoiceTotal) VALUES (20, TO_DATE(UTL_RAW.CAST_TO_VARCHAR2(HEXTORAW('00009CFD00000000')), 'YYYY-MM-DD HH:MI:SS'), 151.0000, 11.3300, 6.2500, 168.5800);
which returned
Error starting at line 846 in command:
INSERT INTO MMAB_Invoices (CustomerID, InvoiceDate, ProductTotal, SalesTax, Shipping, InvoiceTotal) VALUES (20, TO_DATE(UTL_RAW.CAST_TO_VARCHAR2(HEXTORAW('00009CFD00000000')), 'YYYY-MM-DD HH:MI:SS'), 151.0000, 11.3300, 6.2500, 168.5800)
Error report:
SQL Error: ORA-01841: (full) year must be between -4713 and +9999, and not be 0
*01841. 00000 - "(full) year must be between -4713 and +9999, and not be 0"*
**Cause: Illegal year entered*
**Action: Input year in the specified range*
The PK InvoiceID is automatically generated by a BEFORE INSERT trigger that uses a sequence.
Suggestions?
Thanks.
P.S. Happy New Year!!!

Answer 1

Your hex conversion is certainly not returning a date format:
sql> select UTL_RAW.CAST_TO_VARCHAR2(HEXTORAW('00009CFD00000000')) from dual;
UTL_RAW.CAST_TO_VARCHAR2(HEXTORAW('00009CFD00000000'))
  ┐²To convert the hex number to decimal, simply use to_number:
sql> select to_number('00009CFD00000000', 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx') from dual;
TO_NUMBER('00009CFD00000000','XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX')
                                      1.7261E+14Now, before you can make any further calculations with that number, you need to know how it represents the date of 2010-01-13. Luckily, we've got Google nowadays. ;-)
Sql server representation seems to be an 8 byte field. The first 4 bytes stores the number of days since SQL Server's epoch (1st Jan 1900). The second 4 bytes stores the number of milliseconds after midnight.
sql> select to_number('00009CFD', 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx') from dual;
TO_NUMBER('00009CFD','XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX')
                                   40189
sql> select to_date('1900-01-01','yyyy-mm-dd') + 40189 from dual;
TO_DATE('
13-JAN-10So, the conversion would be something like this:
sql> select to_date('1900-01-01','yyyy-mm-dd') + to_number(substr('00009CFD00000000',1,8), 'xxxxxxxx') + to_number(substr('00009CFD00000000',9,8), 'xxxxxxxx') / (24*60*60*1000) from dual;
TO_DATE('
13-JAN-10Note: Oracle DATE format specifies a datetime up to the second, whereas the sqlserver DATETIME format specifies a datetime up to the millisecond; if that precision is needed, use Oracle's TIMESTAMP instead.
Note: using an internal representation is risky, implementation details may change. In this case, it seems pretty unlikely that Microsoft will ever change the datetime internal representation, since that would break lots and lots of code.
Edited by: theoa on 2-jan-2012 9:14