On Date Formats

Regular readers of my blog know that from time to time I use the blog as a forum to answer questions I get via e-mail. Today, we address a popular theme - dealing with DB2 date data...

Q:I have a DATE column in a DB2 table, but I do not want it to display the way DB2 displays it by default. How can I get a date format retrieved from a column in a table from DB2 database in the format MM/DD/YYYY?

A:The simplest way to return a date in the format you desire is to use the built-in column function CHAR. Using this function you can convert a date column into any number of formats. The specific format you request, MM/DD/YYYY, is the USA date format. So, for example, to return the date in the format you requested for a column named START_DATE you would code the function as follows:

CHAR(START_DATE,USA)

The first argument is the column name and the second argument is the format. Consult the following table for a list of the date formats that are supported by DB2.

Name	Layout	Example
ISO	yyyy-mm-dd	2002-10-22
USA	mm/dd/yyyy	10/22/2002
EUR	dd.mm.yyyy	22.10.2002
JIS	yyyy-mm-dd	2002-10-22
LOCAL	Locally defined layout	N/A

You may also have an installation-defined date format that would be named LOCAL. For LOCAL, the date exit for ASCII data is DSNXVDTA, the date exit for EBCDIC is DSNXVDTX, and the date exit for Unicode is DSNXVDTU.

Of course, this is a simple date question... I will follow-up with some additional date-related questions and answers in my next couple of blog posts.