SQL built-in functions   Donald K. Burleson

Oracle is continuing its commitment to extending the SQL language by providing numerous new built-in functions.

As we may recall, Oracle started to allow end-users to create their own functions starting in Oracle8, such that just about any function imaginable could be encapsulated and used directly inside an Oracle SQL statement.

Continuing with Oracle’s commitment towards World Wide Web e-commerce systems, Oracle introduced a wealth of built-in functions to allow worldwide systems to properly managed times:

The primary purpose of these built-in functions is to translate date-times for both local and global processing.  For example, in a worldwide e-commerce system it is important to understand the local time that order was placed, especially when shipping commitments have been made based upon the local processing time.  However, the centralized headquarters still needs to be able to extract the dates based on a global time, such as Greenwich mean time.

The new date-time BIFs include:

• CURRENT_DATE

• CURRENT_TIMESTAMP

• LOCALTIMESTAMP

• DBTIMEZONE

• SESSIONTIMEZONE

• EXTRACT

• FROM_TZ

• TO_TIMESTAMP

• TO_TIMESTAMP_TZ

• TO_YMINTERVAL

• TZ_OFFSET

In sum, Oracle is continuing to make a commitment by introducing well over 30 different built-in functions, thereby extending the functionality all the Oracle SQL to provide a wealth of business-related functions.