Formatting Dates on Oracle

You will love this blog because date functions and formatting differ dramatically between databases, but I have covered that with brilliant examples and clear and concise explanations below.

All of these examples have come from my books and training classes. Please do me a favor and tell your training coordinator that you know the best technical trainer in the world. Ask them to hire me to train at your company, either on-site or with a virtual class. They can see our classes, outlines, and a sample of my teaching at this link on our website.

https://coffingdw.com/education/

Do you need to format dates on Oracle? This blog will brilliantly break down and explain everything about the TO_CHAR command so you will easily format an Oracle date in any way you desire.

Oracle uses the TO_CHAR command to transform raw date or timestamp data to format it as you want it presented.

For example, SELECT TO_CHAR (current_date, ‘YYYY-MM-DD’) FROM DUAL, would format the current date as ‘YYYY-MM-DD’. You can tailor the output by including various format specifiers for years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds, and more.

I will start with the basics, give you all the elements so you can put together the format you want, give you a table with the most popular formats per industry in the United States, and then show you some top standards worldwide, and finally, provide you with a table that has 3,000 examples.

Below is a picture of two queries to see the syntax and how the TO_CHAR function is implemented on an Oracle system. Here is a cheat sheet to give you some insight into some of the main components in a TO_CHAR statement.

YYYY: Represents the year in four digits (e.g., 2024).
YY: Represents the year in two digits (e.g., 24).
MM: Represents the month in two digits (e.g., 04 for April).
DD: Represents the day of the month in two digits (e.g., 12).
Month: Name of month capitalized, padded with blanks to length of 9 characters.
Mon: Name of month abbreviated and capitalized.
DY: Day of the week abbreviated all in uppercase.
DAY: Full name of the day of the week in uppercase padded with blanks to length of 9 characters.
Day: Full name of the day of the week capitalized padded with blanks to length of 9 characters.
RM: Roman numeral representation of the month.

I bet you didn’t know you could use the TO_CHAR function in the WHERE and AND clauses to filter rows. The query below only returns rows where the customer_timestamp has a month of December, a day of Saturday, a minute of 54, seconds of 35, and milliseconds of 000.

Below is a chart to show you the elements or components you can use to format a date using the TO_CHAR command.

Here is a table with Oracle format examples from industries in the United States you might want to adopt.

Here is a table with the 13 most common date format standards used worldwide.

Here is a table with 3000 examples of Oracle date formats I tested so you know they will work.