Dalton,

I agree with the basic sentiment of what you say, but I see no reason why
support for yyyymmdd cannot easily be added. IB is already supporting three ways
of reading date strings. All of them are regional standards. The work involved
to add another display format must be fairly trivial (he says optimistically).
And I would argue that the need to support the ISO date format would justify
that work.

(Of course, I think the ISO date format is slightly different to the SDF
mentioned in Josephs originaly suggestion. But I would start with the premise
that we need to support a recognised international format, unless a
'proprietary' one can be argued to be more important.)

When the source comes we will be able to discuss these sorts of minor tweaks a
lot more easily.

Paul



dcalford wrote:

>
> How do you want the support?
> If it is for data import, then you can write your own import utility that
> supports this format and you can implement this immediately without the need
> for touching the server.
> If it is for importing from external files, then you can use the substring udf
> and a stored procedure to convert the SDF date to a regular date.
> If it is for current use in sql statements, you can write UDF's that converts
> SDF/IB dates and allows thier use in current sql systems.
>
> This would allow for immediate use of SDF dates and not require any
> modifications to the server.
>
> We must try to double check our wish lists. If we get over zealous adding
> features to IB, then we will never have a stable release and we will be forever
> trapped with buggy code.
> The linux kernel is undergoing that problem right now. The latest 'stable'
> kernel, is very unstable. They are rushing to fix it, but as they have been
> adding features, they have been causing domino style errors in totally
> different areas.
>
> IB is powerful enough as it is to be easily extended to handle things like
> this. It is not as easy as other platforms, but, I will take stability over
> ease of use, any day.
>

--

Paul Reeves
Fleet River Software
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