Question

I believe this has been a bug/problem in SQL 2000/2005 … If my results have null on DATETIME column, i get

com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.sqlserverexception: 
 the conversion from int to date is unsupported

when i use sql.getDate("ColumnName") …
Any solutions to this?

[EDIT]
Hi all thanks for your inputs, below is my SQL query

select p.planno            as PlanNumber, 
       t.TrancheID         as TrancheID, 
       t.tranchestartdate  as TrancheStartDate, 
       t.tranchereasoncode as TrancheReasonCode, 
       ai.ArrayItemDecode  TrancheReasonDescription, 
       t.trancheuwstage    as UnderwritingStatusCode 
from   plan_ p 
       inner join tranche t 
         on t.planno = p.planno 
            and t.trancheuwstage in ( 2, 4 ) 
            and p.planno = '040000000X6' 
       inner join arrayitem ai 
         on ai.ArrayNm = 'arrTraReas' 
            and ai.ArrayItemCode = t.tranchereasoncode;  

and the culprit here is tranchestartdate which is a DATETIME. I can’t really add anything to tabel as i’m not allowed to change existing table structures, this is a big system. Perhaps i can do the casting in my SQL? I’m not quite sure if this is definitely a null problem.. Can one debug/watch through the ResultSet and check if any data was retrieved before i call getDate()?
[/EIDT]

Answer 1

If your application (or drivers) cannot handle null dates then the easiest thing might be to use ISNULL(field, <null replacement date>) and check for the null replacement date in code. This approach uses a magic number (date) to indicate null values, true. It’s not pretty but it is quick and straightforward.