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Add ISO day to format model for date functions

Thorsten KettnerFeb 4 2019 — edited Feb 4 2019

In order to have a reliable day number, I suggest adding the format 'ID' to the format models to represent the ISO day (according to ISO 8601), where 1 is always Monday and 7 is always Sunday.

SELECT * FROM surcharges WHERE isodaynum = TO_CHAR(SYSDATE, 'ID');

Explanation:

So far there only exists a single D for format masks, meaning "day of week (1-7)". Which weekdays the numbers 1-7 stand for, however, depends on the session's NLS_TERRITORY setting. So while we can use

SELECT 'This is the ' || TO_CHAR(SYSDATE, 'D') || '. day of the week.' FROM DUAL;

We cannot use

SELECT * FROM surcharges WHERE daynum = TO_CHAR(SYSDATE, 'D');

because the result would be non-deterministic. It would return either the Sunday or the Monday surcharges depending on current session settings.

Comments

Sven W.

I support that idea.

Although to be fair we can currently use the IW format mask for most such tasks.

For example to harmonize all days to an iso week we can do this.

select trunc(sysdate,'IW') from dual;


And to find out what day of week it is according to iso-numbering (Monday= day 1) then we have several other possiblities.

select trunc(sysdate) - trunc(sysdate,'IW') + 1 from dual;

or by using a specific day, that we know to be monday

select to_number(to_char(sysdate,'D')) - (to_number(to_char(date '2001-01-01','D')) - 1) weekday_corrected from dual;

What doesn't work is to use NLS_TERRITORY

select to_char(date '2001-01-01','D','nls_territory=GERMANY') from dual

ORA-12702: invalid NLS parameter string used in SQL function

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Added on Feb 4 2019
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