Exploring data types

ISO 8601 proposes three characteristics related to date and time models:

• The DATE data type is used to deal with the granularities of the year, month, and day
• The TIME data type deals with the hour, minute, and second elements
• By combining those two types, the DATETIME data type is introduced

Typically, the precision is the second element itself, which can also be expanded to cover fractions of a second. This principle is used, for example, in the MySQL database system. Oracle Database has not adopted the preceding three types. It uses the DATE data type, which deals with the date and time elements up to second granularity. Thus, it is impossible to deal with the year, month, and day elements without the time elements. However, to avoid using the time elements, some time elements have the option to hold a 0 value. However, all those elements are always present, stored, and referenceable. As a result, if the solution does not require time...