Where I once worked as a contractor
IT support took care of creating reports for the bosses via an Oracle Forms & Reports type application which they had written. I was given the task of creating a dozen or so reports which returned results from the system that I had been working on as support didn't know anything about the data contained therein. One requirement all of these reports had in common was the ability to specify a date range i.e. "show me how many thingies were thingied between 15th Jan to 23rd March 2009".

They showed me how to use their gizmo and off I went to create the first report. All pretty straightforward only I couldn't get the date part of the query to work. I tried putting it in single or double quotes, tried formatting it different ways, nothing I tried worked. So, I asked one of the support guys to show me how to query by date. He sent me an example.

Bleeding Flip! Every date comparison in his example involved breaking down the date in the database to e.g. first 4 characters for year, characters 6 and 7 for month, etc and doing the same to the dates specified in the query. He had then written some massive Decode (Oracle If, Then, Else, function) along the lines of If year1 greater than year2 and month1 greater than month2 and day1 greater than day2 and year2 less than year3, etc, etc which took up the whole screen and then used that repeatedly in every place where there was a date comparison.

Our database contained tens of millions of records, if I tried to run a query like that it would never come back.

Did I mention that they wrote this application? Yet no one ever thought to fix the "dates don't work" bug. Instead they wrote queries that killed the database. Insane.

This is way too geeky but I've typed it now...

In case you're wondering, I found a workaround which involved substituting the dates specified into a string and sending that to the database bypassing their bollocks tool.
( stopmeandslapme Cometh the hour, cometh your mum, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 12:49, 1 reply)

Its not a bug....
..........Its a design feature ;)
(Obi wanker nobi Its not a bug, its an unexpected feature, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 13:59, closed)