How to generate current Oracle timestamp in perl?

Question

I use DBI. And I want to make some like

INSERT INTO ... VALUES (the_generated_timestamp, ...);

What is the command? How could it be created, the perl ocaltime scalar value has a very complex, for human eyes optimized format (f.e. Mon Apr 28 15:58:51 2014). My goal were some like as the unix gettimeofday() does (giving back the seconds since 1970.1.1), converted by some format string, which I can let eat by the Oracle.

But any simpler solution were also okay, if it exists.

It need to be generated in perl. INSERT ... (current_timestamp, ...) isn't okay.

Answer 1

Something like this will do:

my ($second, $minute, $hour, $day, $month, $year, $weekday, $dayofyear, $dst) = localtime();

my $oracledatestring = sprintf "TO_DATE('%04d/%02d/%02d %02d:%02d:%02d', 'yyyymmdd HH24:MI:SS')", $year+1900, $month+1, $day, $hour, $minute, $second;

.. giving something like:

TO_DATE('2014/04/28 16:34:34', 'yyyymmdd HH24:MI:SS')

... which can then be inserted directly into an Oracle DATE column.

All a bit of a long way round, to be honest. Use SYSDATE in your INSERT statements instead.