Maximo UI SQL Select Month - sql

Question

I am trying to write a query using SQL in the Maximo 7.5 UI advanced search function which will return data from the month before the month in which the query was run. I want to save this query and make it available to users who will run the query without editing it. For example, if a user ran the saved query on 1/25/2019, the query would return all records for which the date was any day in December 2018. I have previously used "where actfinish >= sysdate-30" but the length on months varies and I cannot rely on the users (who do not write SQL) to always run the query on the first day of each month, so I need the query to filter by the previous month. The field I am filtering on is a DATE field, but in the DB it looks like DD-MMM-YY.

Answer 1

Your current where actfinish >= sysdate-30 will return data from the current month, as well as the issues you mentioned.
You can do something like:
where actfinish >= add_months(trunc(sysdate, 'MM'), -1)
and actfinish < trunc(sysdate, 'MM')
The trunc(sysdate, 'MM') gives you midnight on the first day of the current month. The first clausesubtracts a month from that, so gives you midnight on the first day of the previous month; the second clause prevent any record from this month being included.
You can check what those evaluate to by querying the terms outside your real query:
alter session set nls_date_format = 'YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS';
select sysdate,
add_months(trunc(sysdate, 'MM'), -1) as month_from,
trunc(sysdate, 'MM') as month_to
from dual;
SYSDATE MONTH_FROM MONTH_TO
------------------- ------------------- -------------------
2019-01-25 12:59:53 2018-12-01 00:00:00 2019-01-01 00:00:00
The alter session is just to make the client format the results in a particular way, instead of explicitly doing to_char().
When you said "in the DB it looks like DD-MMM-YY", it doesn't actually look like that in the database; when you query the date values your client is formatting the dates like that, so your NLS_DATE_FORMAT is probably set to the still-default DD-MON-RR model. (And it's MON in Oracle, not MMM - see the format model elements in the docs.)

Answer 2

Your solution will depend on the type of database that is being used.
For SQL Server, we have used logic along the following lines:
actfinish between dateadd(day,1,eomonth(dateadd(month,-2,getdate()))) and eomonth(dateadd(month,-1,getdate()))
(identify the last day of the previous month and the last day of the month before that + 1 day)
For Oracle, the equivalent would be:
trunc(actfinish,'MONTH') = add_months(trunc(sysdate,'MONTH'),-1)
(identify the year and month associated with last month and compare that against the target date components - trunc month function removes the time and day of month components so making comparisons easier)

Answer 3

I have previously used "where actfinish >= sysdate-30" but the length
on months varies.
By "length of month", do you mean the number of days for each month (e.g. 30, 31, 28, 29) or just a formatting issue with the month? If I understood your question correctly, you can convert the date to character then convert that to date and Oracle will take care of the change in the number of days. For example, something like:
where to_date(to_char(actfinish, 'mm/dd/yyyy')) >= to_date(to_char(sysdate, 'mm/dd/yyyy'))-30
or
where to_date(to_char(actfinish), 'mm/dd/yyyy') >= to_date(to_char(sysdate), 'mm/dd/yyyy')-30
I don't have Maximo installed on my personal laptop so you can try the two I listed above.