Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari!murtoa.cs.mu.oz.au!ditmela!yarra!melba!gnb
From: gnb@melba.bby.oz (Gregory N. Bond)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Ingres ESQL/C & Unix date formats
Message-ID: <42@melba.oz>
Date: 15 Nov 88 00:17:21 GMT
Reply-To: gnb@melba.oz.au (Gregory Bond)
Organization: Burdett, Buckeridge & Young Ltd, Melbourne
Lines: 22

I'm trying to use embedded SQL from C, calling the ingres database to
extract and process data.  The problem I'm having is converting Ingres
dates to unix time(3)-style dates (i.e. #secs since 1/1/70).

Ingres insists on considering dates as 26 character strings.
The best solution I can find is something like
	select int4(interval('secs', date_col - date('1/1/70')))
	from ....
which almost seems to work, but problems with timezones seem to make
this unreliable (we just went on to DST here...) as Ingres is converting
the '1/1/70' to local time....  Not to mention SLOW.

date('') doesn't work, nor does int4(date_col).

What do others use here?

Greg.
P.S. Why the &^%&^*&^ doesn't ingres have a substring operator???????
-- 
Gregory Bond, Burdett Buckeridge & Young Ltd, Melbourne, Australia
Internet: gnb@melba.bby.oz.au    non-MX: gnb%melba.bby.oz@uunet.uu.net
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