title: Dates month names language in Oracle?
body: <p>I have a <code>varchar</code> field in my table which contains a date, formatted as: <code>Dic 31 1999 12:00AM</code>, which can generally be converted without any problems using a <code>to_date</code> configuring <code>'Mon DD YYYY HH:MIAM'</code>.</p>
  
  <p>Month names can of course come in any language. For instance, January, would be <code>Jan</code> in English and <code>Ene</code> in Spanish.</p>
  
  <p>I reckon the Oracle client will pick up the machine's locale to figure which is the language of the incoming string. The only problem is that this will not always work if you are a server where you can't really know where the date is coming from.</p>
  
  <p>My current problem is that every time I'm in a Spanish set computer and try to process a date with English named months, I'll get an "invalid month" error.</p>
  
  <p>Is there I way I could tell Oracle, on execution time, which is the language I'm sending?</p>
  
  <p>The current ugly workaround is to translate not matching months to Spanish.</p>