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Asked: 2026-05-13T09:06:13+00:00

I’m working on a .Net WinForms appliation that is connecting to a legacy RDB

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I’m working on a .Net WinForms appliation that is connecting to a legacy RDB database…

Some of the fields for dates are stored as integers (imagine 2010-01-04 was the integer 20100104)

In the .Net world, I’d much rather work with datetime objects and I’ve been able to convert the integer into a date, just that it looks so ugly, takes up lots of lines, is prone to errors and I’m wondering if anyone would be able to improve it…Thanks heaps!

Note – I cannot edit the database so creating any form of “function” is out of the question…

Here’s my current way of selecting the integer as a datetime:

select
CAST(
SUBSTRING(DATE_COL AS VARCHAR(8)) FROM 1 FOR 4) ||
'-' ||
SUBSTRING(CAST(DATE_COL) AS VARCHAR(8)) FROM 5 FOR 2) ||
'-' ||
SUBSTRING(CAST(DATE_COL) AS VARCHAR(8)) FROM 7 FOR 2) ||
' 00:00:00'
AS TIMESTAMP) AS DATE_COL
from MY_TABLE
where ...
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It’s been a while since I had to mess with Rdb. I seem to recall that there was a way to convert to a TIMESTAMP datatype by doing something like

    CAST('YYYYMMDDHHMMSSTT' AS TIMESTAMP)

    WHERE ‘YYYYMMDDHHNNSSTT’ was a character string in year-month-day-hour-min-sec-fraction format. You may need to use DATE ANSI here instead of TIMESTAMP – like I say, it’s been a while. Regardless, the following might work:

    SELECT CAST((CAST(DATE_COL AS CHAR(8)) || '00000000') AS TIMESTAMP)...

    which is still ugly but is perhaps better than all the substringing. Anyways, play with it a bit and I’m sure you’ll get it.

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