They migrated to Snowflake within a month. But every now and then, Priya receives a ping from an unknown IP address. The payload: a single timestamp, formatted in that weird, forgotten type.
Priya realized: The Oracle’s date tables used a proprietary, undocumented timestamp type from a long-bankrupt middleware company. The ODBC driver could see the columns but couldn’t cast them.
Mark suggested giving up. “We’ll manual-key the data.”
SELECT CAST(weird_timestamp AS DATE) as shipping_date, package_id FROM legacy_manifest WHERE weird_timestamp > TO_DATE('2000-01-01', 'YYYY-MM-DD') No luck. The driver crashed with “Numeric overflow (ORA-01426)” .