How to insert a timestamp in Oracle?

Question

I have an Oracle DB with a timestamp field in it. What is the correct SQL code to insert a timestamp into this field?

Answer 1

Kind of depends on where the value you want to insert is coming from. If you want to insert the current time you can use CURRENT_TIMESTAMP as shown in other answers (or SYSTIMESTAMP).

If you have a time as a string and want to convert it to a timestamp, use an expression like

to_timestamp(:timestamp_as_string,'MM/DD/YYYY HH24:MI:SS.FF3')

The time format components are, I hope, self-explanatory, except that FF3 means 3 digits of sub-second precision. You can go as high as 6 digits of precision.

If you are inserting from an application, the best answer may depend on how the date/time value is stored in your language. For instance you can map certain Java objects directly to a TIMESTAMP column, but you need to understand the JDBC type mappings.