Question

I want to know if I can store a field called flight_time this is the time the flight departs not how long it takes like someone else suggested making me use the wrong data type of interval….

I want to just store a time and not the current time but one in the future I have the date written out in a separate field flight_date.

Questions

Maybe I am approaching this wrong as I think you can store the time with the date in that one field?

Is there any data type where I can mask the format but I don’t want to convert anything?

What about just using VARCHAR2 because I am going to type it out any way once I populate the table?

Answer 1

You should store flight date and time value as a single column of type date. You can then choose how to format that value for your UI.

If you use 11g you could pre-format it using virtual columns e.g:

create table t1
   ( flight_date date,
     flight_time as (to_char(flight_date,'HH24:SS:MI')),
     flight_day as (to_char(flight_date,'dd/mm/yyyy'))
   ); 

although formatting should probably be done in your UI code.