Using Oracle to_date function for date string with milliseconds

Question

I have to perform some inserts into an Oracle DB. I have some dates in the following format

'23.12.2011 13:01:001' 

Following the documentation I wrote inserts to_date as follows:

to_date('23.12.2011 13:01:01', 'DD.MM.YYYY HH24:MI:SS') 

which works properly. Now I have dates with milliseconds with the format

'23.12.2011 13:01:001' 

I've tried the following:

to_date('23.12.2011 13:01:001', 'DD.MM.YYYY HH24:MI:SSFF3') 

which is incorrect (delivers an error 01821. 00000 - "date format not recognized").

Which "String" should I use for this format with milliseconds?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

An Oracle DATE does not store times with more precision than a second. You cannot store millisecond precision data in a DATE column.

Your two options are to either truncate the string of the milliseconds before converting it into a DATE, i.e.

to_date( substr('23.12.2011 13:01:001', 1, 19), 'DD.MM.YYYY HH24:MI:SS' ) 

or to convert the string into a TIMESTAMP that does support millisecond precision

to_timestamp( '23.12.2011 13:01:001', 'DD.MM.YYYY HH24:MI:SSFF3' ) 

Answer 2

TO_DATE supports conversion to DATE datatype, which doesn't support milliseconds. If you want millisecond support in Oracle, you should look at TIMESTAMP datatype and TO_TIMESTAMP function.

Hope that helps.