TIMESTAMP_FORMAT option

Function

Sets the format used for timestamps retrieved from the database.

Allowed values

A string composed of the symbols listed below.

Default

'YYYY-MM-DD HH:NN:ss.SSS'

Description

The format is a string using the following symbols:

Table 2-17: TIMESTAMP_FORMAT string symbols

Symbol

Description

yy

Two-digit year

yyyy

Four-digit year

mm

Two-digit month, or two digit minutes if following a colon (as in 'hh:mm')

mmm

Three-character short form for name of the month of year

mmmm[m...]

Character long form for month name—as many characters as there are m's, until the number of m’s specified exceeds the number of characters in the month’s name.

dd

Two-digit day of month

ddd

Three-character short form for name of the day of week

dddd[d...]

Character long form for day name—as many characters as there are d's, until the number of d’s specified exceeds the number of characters in the day’s name.

hh

Two-digit hours

nn

Two-digit minutes

ss.SSS

Seconds (ss) and fractions of a second (SSS), up to six decimal places. Not all platforms support timestamps to a precision of six places.

aa

Am or pm (12 hour clock)

pp

Pm if needed (12 hour clock)

Each symbol is substituted with the appropriate data for the date being formatted. Any format symbol that represents character rather than digit output can be put in uppercase which will cause the substituted characters to also be in uppercase. For numbers, using mixed case in the format string will suppress leading zeros.

Note that multibyte characters are not supported in format strings. Only single-byte characters are allowed, even when the collation order of the database is a multibyte collation order like 932JPN. See the section “DATE_FORMAT option” for more information.