Would YOU date oracle?

[tigertosser]

So recently, like a few months ago I discovered that Oracle uses something retarded for dates. 1970/1/1 ? WTF? WHY? Why would they do that? It's so confusing and annoying to work with. Having to figure out shit in a billion different databases makes me cry.

Comments

[cat_gone_astray]

Which one is the month and which one is the date? I remember writing dates with year month day in school, biggest to smallest! I think we did them that way in French, but I might be mistaken.

[tigertosser]

No see, i didn't explain myself properly, I was at work. Oracle bases their dates off how many seconds from 1970/1/1 it is. So right now it's at some retardedly huge number that takes up a lot of space due to this.

[floorpirate]

That's.... the worst method of keeping time/date I've ever seen.

[tigertosser]

I'm sure there's some better explanation. I bet Sloot could clarify.

[lactam]

uh, it's Unix time. It's immune to Y2K and stuff.

[tigertosser]

But not immune to becoming a very large problem.

[lactam]

It's stored as a Large Unsigned INT, so it's good. It'll be large, but it's good.

[cat_gone_astray]

Ohhh ok. Um, yeah, I don't get it. :(
I mean I understand your explanation, I think, but I can't fathom their reasoning.

[tigertosser]

Maybe they were rebels and wanted to be like "Oh we don't want to use that archaic form of dating like basing the date on how many years after the birth of some religious nut it was." So they based it on how many years after the birth of something else. Nothing says awesome like "1970".. or rather, "awesomely huge and will soon run out of space".

[cat_gone_astray]

Maybe they thought that by 1980 we wouldn't be using Oracle or computers anymore, so it wouldn't actually matter when they started their dating system. Or maybe they were on drugs. That's a possibility too. : )

[tigertosser]

True, it was the 70's. heh.