[Dbix-class] Inflating and deflating Oracle dates

[Matt S Trout]

Dan Horne wrote:
> I'm trying to figure out how to inflate/deflate Oracle dates. Oracle doesn't
> distinguish between date and datetime datatypes. If you don't provide a time
> component, the time defaults to '00:00'
> 
> In addition, Oracle assumes a default date format of 'DD-MON-YY', or
> '%d-%b-%y' in POSIX-speak. If you use a different format, then you need to
> tell Oracle:
> 
> insert into test(date_column) values ('01-JUN-2006 12:17', 'DD-MON-YYYY
> HH24:MI');
> 
> In other words, while there may be a canonical datetime format for a DB like
> MySQL, Oracle lets you specify your preferred format when selecting and
> inserting/updating.
> 
> There are ways around this. You can declare alternate default date formats
> at both the database (global) or session levels. Since most DBAs would baulk
> at the first approach, we could issue something like this:
> 
> alter session set NLS_DATE_FORMAT='YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS';
> 
> This would probably need to be issued on connect, but how would you go about
> doing this? Can you provide callbacks to say a method in the Oracle storage
> class?

Couldn't you just mirror how on_connect_do handles this?