Date type

You can specify the characteristics of the date type.

  • Byte order. Specifies how multiple byte data types are ordered. Choose from:
    • little-endian. The high byte is on the right.
    • big-endian. The high byte is on the left.
    • native-endian. As defined by the native format of the machine.
  • Character Set. Choose from ASCII or EBCDIC.
  • Days since. Dates are written as a signed integer containing the number of days since the specified date. Enter a date in the form %yyyy-%mm-%dd or in the default date format if you have defined a new one on an NLS system.
  • Data Format. Specifies the data representation format of a column. Choose from:
    • binary
    • text

      For dates, binary is equivalent to specifying the julian property for the date field, text specifies that the data to be written contains a text-based date in the form %yyyy-%mm-%dd or in the default date format if you have defined a new one on an NLS system.

  • Default. The default value for a column. This is used for data written by a Generate stage. It also supplies the value to substitute for a column that causes an error (whether written or read).
  • Format string. The string format of a date. By default this is %yyyy-%mm-%dd. For details about the format, see Date formats.

    If this format string does not include a day, it is set to the first of the month in the destination field. If the format string does not include the month and day, they default to January 1. Note that the format string must contain a month if it also contains a day; that is, you cannot omit only the month.

  • Is Julian. Select this to specify that dates are written as a numeric value containing the Julian day. A Julian day specifies the date as the number of days from 4713 BCE January 1, 12:00 hours (noon) GMT.