Oracle Date Functions

EDGAR Online: Wheels-Up

For reference, the SEC had set a three-year phase-in period for reporting companies to comply with the new eXtensible Business Reporting Language filing format. The 500 largest market-cap companies were required to file in XBRL for the June 2009 quarter; the next largest group of 1,200 companies had to file in XBRL starting for the June 2010 quarter; and now the balance of approximately 8,700 companies must file in XBRL by August 15. Over the last 2.5 years, companies and solution providers have had time to develop and refine their XBRL software solutions to meet the terms of the mandate or establish out-sourced alternatives. But it wasn't always wheels-up for EDGAR Online. As a pioneer in the XBRL field, the company built its massive proprietary XBRL historic database as well as its XBRL data and analytics products on its own nickel and long before the SEC had mandated the XBRL standard. As a result of their investment in building its XBRL resources, the company has incurred the staggering amount of $45.2 million in federal net operating loss carry-forwards as of Dec, 31, 2010. Yet, although flying in lonely skies, EDGAR Online was committed to XBRL and proceeded to build a 10+ year historic XBRL financial database for all SEC-reporting companies, and over the last decade, the company has developed XBRL data and analytics services. These products are supported by EDGAR Online's advanced XBRL data-mining systems and methods. Now that companies are reporting for the second quarter, XBRL filings will soon start ramping up sharply as the August 15 deadline approaches. So far, just for the two-week period ended July 29, there have been a total of 509 XBRL filings made for Q2 10-Qs, or approximately 4.9% of the expected 10,400 required filings to be made. EDGAR Online has provided XBRL solutions for 42 of those 509 filings. For perspective, in the last three quarters, EDGAR Online has provided about 80 solutions per quarter. How the company's market share will develop over the next few weeks -- as almost 10,000 more filings are made -- will significantly impact the company's operations. Revenue from the ramp-up will largely accrue to the company in Q3 although the company does record some part of those fees in Q2 as they "on-board" client accounts. As to the investment rationale for EDGAR Online, the XBRL Filings business is important but not the primary long-term potential.

Oracle – SQL functions « Oracle DBA Blog

Numeric results

A single-row function may accept multiple input parameters but always returns one value per row.

Single-row numeric functions always return numeric results. Numeric functions are the only category of functions that always return numeric results.

Character and date functions like LENGTH and MONTHS_BETWEEN return numeric results.

If the input argument is char values, if the length of the return value exceeds the maximum length limit of the datatype, then Oracle raises and error and no result is returned.