What are the difference between Oracle DATE and TIMESTAMP type? Both have date and time component? Also what is corresponding type in Java for these date types?
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DATE and TIMESTAMP have the same size (7 bytes). Those bytes are used to store century, decade, year, month, day, hour, minute and seconds. But TIMESTAMP allows to store additional info such as fractional seconds (11 bytes) and fractional seconds with timezone (13 bytes).
TIMESTAMP was added as an ANSI compliant to Oracle. Before that, it had DATE only.
In general cases you should use DATE. But if precision in time is a requirement, use TIMESTAMP.
And about Java, the oracle.sql.DATE class from Oracle JDBC driver, provides conversions between the Oracle Date/Timestamp data type and Java classes java.sql.Date, java.sql.Time and java.sql.Timestamp.
TIMESTAMPis the same asDATE, except it has added fractional seconds precision. - NullUserExceptionDATEis accurate to the second and doesn't have fractional seconds.TIMESTAMPhas fractional seconds. The number of decimal places in the seconds depends on the server OS, for example the Oracle on my Windows 7 machine returns three decimal places for the timestamp whereas a client's huge Solaris box returns six. Timestamps can also hold a specific time zone or be normalized to common time zone - go here and then search for "TIMESTAMP" for more information, then experiment a little :) - Ed Gibbs