Dear Oracle Programmers:

I came across this. Anyone have any idea why the author would have written it like this? I can only assume there is a reason. The author had to consciously write out this line, rather than just "startdate".

SELECT ...,
TO_DATE(TO_CHAR(starttime, 'DD-MON-YYYY HH:MI:SS'), 'DD-MON-YYYY HH:MI:SS'),
...
FROM sometable;

12/20/2010 5:23:03 PM

You're referring to this line, right?:
TO_DATE(TO_CHAR(starttime, 'DD-MON-YYYY HH:MI:SS'), 'DD-MON-YYYY HH:MI:SS')

TO_CHAR converts the non-character variable starttime to a character string with the given format. Then TO_DATE converts that character string with the specified format into a date variable.

12/20/2010 5:52:14 PM

My guess is, the database's default date format is different than what the person wanted to use, thus they used the combination of TO_CHAR TO_DATE to convert the default date format of starttime to the format they wished to use, DD-MON-YYYY HH:MI:SS.

As stated earlier though, this is only a guess.

12/21/2010 6:39:09 AM

^

this

12/21/2010 10:06:48 AM