Using Oracle to_date function for date string with milliseconds

Question

I have to perform some inserts into an Oracle DB. I have some dates in the following format

\'23.12.2011 13:01:001\'

Following the documen

Answer 1

An Oracle DATE does not store times with more precision than a second. You cannot store millisecond precision data in a DATE column.

Your two options are to either truncate the string of the milliseconds before converting it into a DATE, i.e.

to_date( substr('23.12.2011 13:01:001', 1, 19), 'DD.MM.YYYY HH24:MI:SS' )

or to convert the string into a TIMESTAMP that does support millisecond precision

to_timestamp( '23.12.2011 13:01:001', 'DD.MM.YYYY HH24:MI:SSFF3' )