Horton

Re: A creepy story about dates. How to prevent it?

Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>

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From: Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>
To: "scott.marlowe" <scott.marlowe@ihs.com>
Cc: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net>, Jean-Luc Lachance <jllachan@nsd.ca>, Frank Miles <fpm@u.washington.edu>, Bruno Wolff III <bruno@wolff.to>, Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net>, pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Date: 2003-06-23T19:24:11Z
Lists: pgsql-general 
scott.marlowe wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Jun 2003, Tom Lane wrote:
> 
> > "scott.marlowe" <scott.marlowe@ihs.com> writes:
> > > The one thing that should absolutely be turned off is day/month swapping 
> > > on dates of the form: 2003-02-22.
> > 
> > Agreed on that.  YYYY-DD-MM isn't used in the real world AFAIK, and it's
> > reasonable to treat it as an error.
> > 
> > > I've seen little actual defense of the current behaviour,
> > 
> > Other than me, I think you mean.  dd/mm/yyyy and mm/dd/yyyy are
> > inherently ambiguous in the real world, and when you can clearly
> > determine what the intended meaning is, I think it's more reasonable
> > to assume the datestyle isn't set correctly than to reject the data.
> 
> I thought the locale set that kind of behaviour didn't it?  If so, then 
> it's better to fail loudly then quietly accept bad data.  But if the 
> locale doesn't define such a thing, or it can't be set in postgresql.conf, 
> the it's best to just avoid that date style altogether.

Added to TODO, with question mark:

	* Have initdb set DateStyle based on locale?

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