Sybase Adaptive Server IQ 12.4.2, Administration And Performance Manual

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CHAPTER 5 Moving Data In and Out of Databases
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• The input data can include up to nine positions for seconds, including a
floating decimal point, to allow for fractional seconds. On input and query,
the decimal point floats, so you can specify up to six decimal positions.
However, Adaptive Server IQ always stores only six decimal positions
with two positions for whole seconds (ss.ssssss). Any more decimal
positions are not permitted.
• Separators are used between the time elements. You can use any character
as a separator, including blanks. The example uses ':' (colons).
• Adaptive Server IQ stores only the numbers of hours, minutes, and
seconds; it does not store any other characters which might appear in the
input data. However, if the data contains other characters, for example
colons (:) or blanks to separate hours, minutes, and seconds, the time
portion of the format specification must show where those characters
appear so that Adaptive Server IQ knows to skip over them.
• To indicate whether a particular value is a.m. or p.m., the input data must
contain an upper- or lowercase 'a' or 'p' in a consistent place. To indicate
where Adaptive Server IQ should look for the a.m. or p.m. designation, put
a lowercase only 'aa' or 'pp' in the appropriate place in the format
specification. `aa' specifies a.m./p.m. is always indicated, while `pp'
specifies that pm is indicated only if needed.
• The format specification must have a character to match every character
in the input; you cannot have an 'm' in the format specification to match
the 'm' in the input, because 'm' is already used to indicate minutes.
• In the time section, when hours or minutes or seconds are not specified,
Adaptive Server IQ assumes 0 for each.
Working With NULLS
Use the
NULL
conversion option to convert specific values in the input data to
NULLS when inserting into Adaptive Server IQ column indexes. This option
can be used with any columns, but the column must allow NULLS. You can
specify this conversion option with any Adaptive Server IQ data type.
Here is the syntax.
NULLS ({BLANKS | ZEROS | literal’ [’literal’]...})
where:
•
BLANKS
indicates that blanks convert to NULLS.