Re: Date fornat on Informix

On Sat, 20 Jun 1998 19:17:00 GMT, Wolfgang Beutner <wbeutner@csi.com> wrote: >Am 20.06.98, 20:32:00, schrieb "Albert Fern=E1ndez Marsal"=20 ><alberfm@tinet.fut.es> zum Thema Date fornat on Informix: > > >> I'm using Informix v 7.0 (in a unix platform), and it's default > >date >> format is d/m/y (spanish format). i must insert some values from a file in >> the m/d/y format. >> >> anyone knows how to change the default date format for Informix?!?= > >> >You should set the shell-variable DBDATE in the environment of user >informix to the desired format before you start the server. There is absolutely no need to do this. May be you get the format you set here as the default format for the engine (I haven't ever tried that), but even if you do it's very unlikely you want that. Just set it in the environement of the user who does the loading and only for the duration of the load. (You need to set it back to whatever you had before to get your applications to work correctly.) > See the >documentation for the applicable formts. I think for you it should be > >DBDATE=3DDMDDYY; export DBDATE. DBDATE=MDY4/export DBDATE or something like that. The 4 and / are usually not very important for importing. If you have 2 digits for the years (4 will still work in the format string but you can then use 2 as well) you will of course eventually get a year 2000 problem which can either be solved by making sure you have 4 digits for the year (the best solution) or using the DBCENTURY environement variable. For DBCENTURY you do however need a newer version than 7.0x. After the import you set it back to: DBDATE=DMY4/export DBDATE assuming you use 4 digits for the years in your applications. If you don't you have to start doing it immediately. Using DBCENTURY is an alternative, but not a good one. Of course DBCENTURY is still interesting to enable users to type in 2 digit years and get them correctly displayed in fields with 4 digits for the year. Nils Myklebust NM Data AS Norway E-mail: Nils.Myklebust@nmdata.com FAQ at: http://www.iiug.org/techinfo/faq/faq_top.html (Now with ODBC info under "Third party products".)