Oracle 8i DATE column returned wrong with 9i thin driver

Question

I have an Oracle 8i database with a column named "timestamp" with the following column metadata:
DATA_TYPE=93
TYPE_NAME=DATE
I execute the following statement:
select "timestamp" from oracle_data_log
When I look at the result set metadata using the Oracle 9i drivers, I get (as expected):
getColumnType=93
getColumnTypeName=DATE
getColumnClassName=java.sql.Timestamp
When I look at the result set metadata using the Oracle 9i drivers, I get:
getColumnType=91
getColumnTypeName=DATE
getColumnClassName=java.sql.Timestamp
That column type 91 indicates it is SQL type DATE which is for date only values (no time information).
Our code (working against many different databases with many different drivers) works off the column type metadata and messes up. (Obviously I can look at the column class name string as well / instead, but I'd like the column type to come back with the proper SQL type.)
As I said, it works as expected with the 8i thin driver (and the DataDirect JDBC driver).

Answer 1

Thanks for the info.
It seems to me that returning a SQL type DATE (which means it only stores date information) for an Oracle DATE type (which stores date and time information) is the wrong thing to do. The Oracle DATE type stores date and time information which corresponds to the SQL TIMESTAMP type. It should return TIMESTAMP as the SQL type.
It seems like it would confuse a client application into thinking there is no time information available, which there is.
A friend suggested that since a SELECT on a DATE value only displays the date portion and not the time portion, that might be why they did it, but that still doesn't sound right. The Oracle DATE type stores date and time which corresponds to the SQL TIMESTAMP type.
I guess they might have done it to distinguish between Oracle DATE and TIMESTAMP types, but I still don't like it...
I wonder if there is any documentation on why Oracle made the decision?