CASE statement - response (2) by cheeli

Hi Dieter,
Can you please explain below (I encountered it in our code - generated through Informatica) -- colname is a varchar(24) unicode

 CAST(
 (
CASE	WHEN ((CHARACTER_LENGTH(tablename.colname) = 8) 
	AND	(tablename.colname  <> '00000000')) THEN
	 CAST(tablename.colname  AS TIMESTAMP FORMAT 'YYYYMMDD') 
ELSE	CAST('00010101' AS TIMESTAMP FORMAT 'YYYYMMDD') 
END	
) AS date)

Instead of casting the colname in both cases to timestamp and then to date, it can be done directly to date as below.

 
 CAST(
 (
CASE	WHEN ((CHARACTER_LENGTH(tablename.colname) = 8) 
	AND	(tablename.colname  <> '00000000')) THEN
	 tablename.colname   
ELSE	'00010101' 
END	
) AS date format 'YYYYMMDD')

Not sure, what caused them to follow the above one.  Is it due to Informatica