March 11, 2009

Date Of Creation According To Oracle

Oracle is meant for big iron databases.

If you are crunching numbers on data for dates before January 1, 1753, you are either using a varchar field storing the UTC value of the date or you are using Oracle.

But what if you are trying to go back further, say, to the beginning of recorded human history? Well, the DATE column in Oracle can't handle that.

Evidently, they thought that nobody would want to store a date prior to the dates that "young earth" creationists point to as the date the world was created.

So if your date is before 4713 B.C., tough luck. ;)

Admittedly, this does cover the date range back to the earliest reported date in the Egyptian calendar (4241 B.C.), but that still misses out on the nearly six thousand years of Egyptian pre-history.

1 comment:

Okie said...

That's actually pretty interesting. I haven't ever been on a project that's hit up against a date restriction (except artificial ones because we try to limit the smartasses on sites saying they're 150 years old or something like that).

Still, it's kind of interesting to think about limitations that technology hits when interacting with the natural world...and also to think about practical applications where these restrictions would become particularly problematic.