Hi John,

John O'Gorman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote:
> 
> Thank you Steffen. That answers my question perfectly. Some small
> examples just
> like yours would be a valuable addition to the documentation!
> 
Yes, I know. And I've already promised to do. But the time goes
by and no time is left for documentation. It'll get a more
important issue.

> Topic 2 - loading aberrant DATE fields
> 
> Informix supply a toy database (in their meaning of database: 
> collection of tables
> with data) called STORES. This allows you to load data and play with
> SQL. 
> The stores data is UNLOADed in America, where they apparently 
> represent dates in 
> MM/DD/YY format. To get these into SAPDB, I have been writing Perl
> scripts to 
> substite the re patterns for MM/DD/YY into (19|20)YYMMDD. Is 
> there a way to
> get repmcli DATALOAD to do this for me? (If so a minimal example would
> be much appreciated!). 
> 
Hmm, the problem is the 19|20 stuff.
Date patterns in general may be
given to commands in 2 ways (this is true for time and timestamp, too):
1. Predefined patterns can be used like USA (MM/DD/YYYY) or ISO (YYYY-MM-DD).
   Those can either be specified using the 'SET DATE <pattern name>' command
   (for instance SET DATE ISO) and are valid for the whole command file until
   reset.
   Or they can be specified for a certain LOAD/EXTRACT command where they
   overwrite the global setting like this

   DATALOAD TABLE <table name>
   <col name> <pos>
   ...
   INFILE '<infile name>'
   DATE ISO

2. Date patterns different from predefined may only be specified in commands
   directly. So you would use this command to load MM/DD/YY dates:

   DATALOAD TABLE <table name>
   <col name> <pos>
   ...
   INFILE '<infile name>'
   DATE 'MM/DD/YY'

Ok, now the problem. Using a 2-digit year representation will always be transformed
into 20YY by the Loader server (only partially true - if you're using 7.3
version there is still a bug and Loader server will transform it into 19YY).

So is there any possibility to 'convince the Informix tools' to store the dates
as 4-digit representation? How did they handle the Y2K bug?

> If the date load would be possible except for the 2 digit 
> year, would it be possible
> to load dates represented as ASCII MM/DD/YYYY ?
> 
Hmm, I should read to the very end before answering in detail.
Yes it is. Here is the command example from above:

   DATALOAD TABLE <table name>
   <col name> <pos>
   ...
   INFILE '<infile name>'
   DATE USA

Regards,
 Steffen
-- 
Steffen Schildberg
SAP DB Team
SAP Labs Berlin
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