Oracle Date Converter
Read an Oracle DATE
The seven-byte internal form, decoded — century and year stored excess-100, everything else plus one — plus the Julian day that `TO_CHAR(d,'J')` gives you.
Questions people ask
The things that come up about oracle date converters, answered plainly.
What do the seven bytes mean?
Century + 100, year-in-century + 100, month, day, hour + 1, minute + 1, second + 1. So 16 July 2024 at 16:00:00 dumps as 120,124,7,16,17,1,1. The offsets exist so no byte is ever zero.
Why does Oracle display dates as DD-MON-YY?
Because NLS_DATE_FORMAT defaults to it. It is a two-digit year in an ambiguous format, which is a genuinely poor default — set it to YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS in any session you care about.
Related tools
Julian days, Excel serials, GPS time, cron expressions and format validators.
SQL Date FormatterOne instant, rendered as a literal for PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, SQLite, BigQuery and Snowflake — plus how each spells 'now' and how each reads a Unix timestamp.
Julian Day Number CalculatorThe whole-number form — the JD of the noon that starts a day — with the Lilian and Rata Die day counts beside it, which are the same idea from different zero points.
Excel Date ConverterA spreadsheet serial to a calendar date and back, in both the 1900 and 1904 systems — with the phantom leap day of 1900 flagged where it matters.
Date FormatterOne date, every common output at once — ISO, RFC, SQL, filename-safe, spoken English — plus a pattern field for anything the list does not cover.