What's the equivalent of Oracle's to_char in AS400 DB2 SQL syntax?

Question

I'm trying to display a DATE field fetched from a DB2 instance.

In Oracle I'd use something like:

to_char(v_date, 'YYYY-MM-DD')

What's the equivalent in AS400 DB2?

Answer 1

In V5R3 or later, use the CHAR() function. To get the same results as your Oracle example, use this:

char(v_date, ISO)

When using the CHAR() function with date fields, you can choose from the following formats: ISO, USA, EUR, JIS, and local. When using "local" as the format, it will use the attributes of the ODBC connection job, which will probably be the system-level values of date format and date separator. The other date formats are as such:

ISO = 'yyyy-mm-dd'
USA = 'mm/dd/yyyy'
EUR = 'dd.mm.yyyy'
JIS = 'yyyy-mm-dd'

In V5R4, you can use the varchar_format function. The only valid formats for this function are 'YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS' and 'YYYY-MM-DD'.

In V6R1 you have better formatting options for the varchar_format function. As mentioned in another answer, to_char is an alternative to varchar_format.

Answer 2

This should help:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/db2/library/techarticle/0211yip/0211yip3.html

Answer 3

It turns out that the DB2 equivalent to "to_char" is... "to_char".

:)

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/db2luw/v9/topic/com.ibm.db2.udb.admin.doc/doc/r0007108.htm

The underlying function is varchar_format, for which to_char is a synonym.