DATE

The DATE data type stores date and time information. For each DATE value, Oracle stores the following information: year, month, day, hour, minute, and second.

The date value can be specified as an ANSI date literal, an Oracle date literal or can be converted from a character or numeric value with the TO_DATE function. The ANSI date literal contains no time portion, and must be specified in the format 'YYYY-MM-DD'. The default date format for an Oracle date literal can be changed by the initialization parameter NLS_DATE_FORMAT.

Date data can range from January 1, 4712 BC to December 31, 9999.

If a date value is specified without a time component, then the default time is 12:00:00 AM. If a date value is specified without a date, then the default date is the first day of the current month.

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TIMESTAMP[(fractional_seconds_precision)]

The TIMESTAMP data type is an extension of the DATE data type. For each TIMESTAMP value, Oracle stores the following information: year, month, day, hour, minute, second and fraction of second.

fractional_seconds_precision optionally specifies the number of digits in the fractional part of second and can be a number in the range 0 to 9. The default is 6.

The TIMESTAMP data type is available in Oracle 9i Release 1 (9.0.1) or later.