Book Image

Developing Robust Date and Time Oriented Applications in Oracle Cloud

By : Michal Kvet
Book Image

Developing Robust Date and Time Oriented Applications in Oracle Cloud

By: Michal Kvet

Overview of this book

Proper date and time management is critical for the development and reliability of Oracle Databases and cloud environments, which are among the most rapidly expanding technologies today. This knowledge can be applied to cloud technology, on premises, application development, and integration to emphasize regional settings, UTC coordination, or different time zones. This practical book focuses on code snippets and discusses the existing functionalities and limitations, along with covering data migration to the cloud by emphasizing the importance of proper date and time management. This book helps you understand the historical background and evolution of ANSI standards. You’ll get to grips with data types, constructor principles, and existing functionalities, and focus on the limitations of regional parameters and time zones, which help in expanding business to other parts of the world. You’ll also explore SQL injection threats, temporal database architecture, using Flashback Technology to reconstruct valid database images from the past, time zone management, and UTC synchronization across regions. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to create and manage temporal systems, prevent SQL injection attacks, use existing functionalities and define your own robust solutions for date management, and apply time zone and region rules.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
1
Part 1: Discovering Oracle Cloud
4
Part 2: Understanding the Roots of Date and Time
7
Part 3: Modeling, Storing, and Managing Date and Time
12
Part 4: Modeling Validity Intervals
17
Part 5: Building Robust and Secure Temporal Solutions
20
Part 6: Expanding a Business Worldwide Using Oracle Cloud

Reliability and integrity issues

It is important to comply with this rule: never rely on implicit conversions, and never treat Date and Time values as character strings by applying the SUBSTR function. By changing the session format, the provided input value does not need to fit the mapping. Imagine a system migration to another server or the cloud. The original formats and assumed parameter values would not be retained. It can result in obtaining an improper value (such as changing the value of month and day, if applicable) or even raising an exception. Thus, it would be necessary to revise and rebuild the whole application! Avoid this situation before it occurs! It is enormously time- and money-consuming and requires the involvement of many developers. In addition, after the process, the whole system must be retested.

Thus, extraction using a substring is insufficient. If the session date format is changed, the extracted value does not need to be relevant. The developer cannot...