Skip to Main Content
IBM Power Ideas Portal


This portal is to open public enhancement requests against IBM Power Systems products, including IBM i. To view all of your ideas submitted to IBM, create and manage groups of Ideas, or create an idea explicitly set to be either visible by all (public) or visible only to you and IBM (private), use the IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com).


Shape the future of IBM!

We invite you to shape the future of IBM, including product roadmaps, by submitting ideas that matter to you the most. Here's how it works:

Search existing ideas

Start by searching and reviewing ideas and requests to enhance a product or service. Take a look at ideas others have posted, and add a comment, vote, or subscribe to updates on them if they matter to you. If you can't find what you are looking for,

Post your ideas
  1. Post an idea.

  2. Get feedback from the IBM team and other customers to refine your idea.

  3. Follow the idea through the IBM Ideas process.


Specific links you will want to bookmark for future use

Welcome to the IBM Ideas Portal (https://www.ibm.com/ideas) - Use this site to find out additional information and details about the IBM Ideas process and statuses.

IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com) - Use this site to view all of your ideas, create new ideas for any IBM product, or search for ideas across all of IBM.

ideasibm@us.ibm.com - Use this email to suggest enhancements to the Ideas process or request help from IBM for submitting your Ideas.

Status Not under consideration
Workspace IBM i
Categories Db2 for i
Created by Guest
Created on Mar 20, 2023

Enhance VARCHAR format option for EUR,JIS,ISO,USA but for LOCAL option

Today, VARCHAR supports a 2nd parameter when the first parameter is a date/time value. That 2nd parameter returns the resulting date value in the designated format.

The LOCAL option returns the value in the Job's format. I would like this enhanced to return the value in the Job's format but with a 4-digit year component. 

That is if in the LOCAL format is MDY, then the returned value would be MM/DD/YYYY, and if LOCAL is DMY then it would return DD/MM/YYYY

Perhasp LOCALEX or LOCAL4 or similar could be used. 

The benefit is that we're trying to avoid End-Users being confused by 3-two-digit components and not really trusting which one is which. So we're trying to avoid the 2-digit year presentation in 100% of the interfaces we are providing.

Idea priority High
  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Apr 20, 2023
    IBM does not intend to provide a solution to this Idea at this time, so it is being closed. Adding new date formats is not a trivial change. The database team has many other higher priority enhancement requests, so this Idea would be unlikely to be implemented any time soon.

    We also want to point out that adding a 4-digit year version of our proprietary date formats does not remove the ambiguity. The month and day can still appear in different orders for MM/DD/YYYY and DD/MM/YYYY. Returning the date using one of the industry standard formats (*ISO, *EUR, *USA, *JIS) is recommended.

    You could build your own function to generate a 4-digit year format. The following partial example demonstrates one way to do this. It uses the knowledge that 99 can only be a year and that 30 cannot be a month to determine what date format is used by the job.

    values case when try_cast('01/30/99' as date) is not null then varchar_format (current date, 'MM/DD/YYYY')
    when try_cast('30/01/99' as date) is not null then varchar_format (current date, 'DD/MM/YYYY')
    when try_cast('99/01/30' as date) is not null then varchar_format (current date, 'YYYY/MM/DD')
    else char(current date) end;

    Db2 for i development team
    IBM Power Systems Development
  • Admin
    Carmelita Ruvalcaba Cevallos
    Reply
    |
    Mar 28, 2023

    The CAAC has reviewed this IBM Idea and recommends that IBM view this as a “nice to have” low priority feature.

    There is value in the community seams to be low.

    Background: The COMMON Americas Advisory Council (CAAC) members have a broad range of experience in working with small and medium-sized IBM i customers. CAAC has a key role in working with IBM i development to help assess the value and impact of individual IBM Ideas on the broader IBM i community and has therefore reviewed your Idea.


    For more information about CAAC, see www.common.org/caac


    Carmelita Ruvalcaba- CAAC Program Manager