Very strange bug when using a view with a date

Question

Hi,
Just thought I'd point out this bug I'd found and see if anybody has had similar problems.
I'm connecting to Oracle 9i from servlets using the thin client-side JDBC driver. In the Oracle schema I've got a few views to another schema set up. One of them looks like this:
select
blah
blah
from
projects
where
project_start_date between '1-Apr-2000' and '31-Mar-2010'
Nothing wrong with this, you'd think. And indeed, the view works fine and any valid queries on the view also work fine if they're performed from anywhere apart from my servlets. The servlets can perform queries on all my other views but they think that this particular view is completely empty.
As soon as I change the view to:
project_start_date > '1-Apr-2000'
the servlets can see the data in the view.
Hope all this made sense. Anybody else had any similar problems?
Chris.

Answer 1

Any time you want to do a date comparison, you really want to do an explicit to_date conversion rather than relying on Oracle to do it implicitly. I'll wager that if you change the view to
SELECT <columnList>
  FROM projects
WHERE project_start_date BETWEEN to_date('1-Apr-2000', 'DD-MON-YYYY') and to_date('31-Mar-2010', 'DD-MON-YYYY')that everything will work.
Justin