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

Investigating the CAST function

The CAST function gets the input value and converts it into the specified data type in the definition. The input value can be provided by the attribute, function result, or expression, or a NULL value can be used. A CAST function can be used where expressions are permitted, using the following syntax:

CAST ( {<expression> | NULL } as <output_datatype> )

In this section, we will explain the DATE and TIMESTAMP data types, which originated from the character string and numerical values. We will focus on the transformations across all data types. Finally, there will be a note related to the undefined value, NULL.

Casting a character string to a DATE value

An example of the usage of the CAST function is reflected in the following code snippet. In the CAST function, a character string is taken by providing the DATE value as the output. The first element is assumed to represent the day followed by the month and year specification. Thus...