Question

I’m working with some data in an Oracle 10g database, specifically bulk updating and reading timestamp information. I had to convert from an MM/DD/YYYY HH24:MI:SS format to a YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS format because of business requirements. As well, the timestamp is stored as a VARCHAR instead of a native datetime due to business requirements.

Unfortunately, now I’m having trouble running select operations on my data.

Specifically, when I run the following select I receive ORA-01861: Literal does not match format string:

SELECT datetime_stamp 
  from entrytable 
where 
  to_date(datetime_stamp, 'YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS') 
  between 
     TO_DATE('11/27/2011 00:00:00', 'MM/DD/YYYY HH24:MI:SS') 
     and 
     TO_DATE('12/06/2011 23:59:59', 'MM/DD/YYYY HH24:MI:SS') 
  and rownum < 1000

I confirmed that the bad argument is to_date(datetime_stamp, ‘YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS’), but now I have 400k rows of data to parse to try and find the bad row.

Is there any way I can have Oracle return the row that is generating the ORA-01861 error?

I’ve tried using REGEXP_LIKE to find data that does not fit [0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9] [0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9], but all rows seem to fit that regular expression.

Answer 1

create function td(s varchar2) return number is
begin
  if to_date(s, 'YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS') is not null then return 1; end if;
  return null;
exception
  when others then return 0;
end;

and then

select datetime_stamp from entrytable where td(datetime_stamp) = 0