Timestamp field in Oracle

Question

I have an application to log some data into my Oracle via ODBC. There's a field called 'timestamp' which is generated automatically by my logging application.
In Oracle, if I do a 'SELECT', it reads 07-MAY-04, but if I import all the data to Access, it reads like this: 5/7/2004 3:08:00 PM.
I want to be able to select a range data based on time. For example, I want to select everything that is within 5/7/2004 1:00:00 PM to 5/7/2004 4:00:00 PM, how do I write my SQL query?

Answer 1

I assume, first of all, that the column named "timestamp" is of type DATE, not of type TIMESTAMP.
In Oracle, a date always contains a date and a time component. The default date format, however, omits the time part of the date when it comes time to display it. You can alter that behavior by using an explicit to_char cast or by altering your NLS_DATE_FORMAT
SELECT to_char( timestamp, 'DD-MON-YYYY HH24:MI:SS' )
  FROM <<your table>>or
ALTER SESSION SET NLS_DATE_FORMAT = 'DD-MON-YYYY HH24:MI:SS';
SELECT timestamp
  FROM <<your table>>When you want to SELECT data, you will want to use the to_date cast to convert a string to a date for comparison, i.e.
SELECT *
  FROM <<your table>>
WHERE timestamp BETWEEN to_date( '5/7/2004 13', 'MM/DD/YYYY HH24' )
                     AND to_date( '5/7/2004 16', 'MM/DD/YYYY HH24' );Justin
Distributed Database Consulting, Inc.
http://www.ddbcinc.com/askDDBC