Obsessed with Oracle PL/SQL

I offered up a past blog post on Twitter today: And I saw this reply: I am unfamiliar with this magical expression: DATE '2016-10-31'. How is this being resolved when it doesn't match the NLS date format? Which reminded me than many developers are not aware of the date Literal feature of both SQL andPL/SQL. So I figured I should give you all a bit more detail on the topic. So you are likely familiar with string literals, like 'ABC' and q'[don't need two single quotes]' .  And who isn't aware of using pretty much all the time number literals, like 123 and 2e7? Relatively few developers know that you can have a date literal, too (and timestamp literal and timestamp with local timezone literal and interval literals). Literals of these types generally have the form: TYPE string-literal where TYPE is the name of the  datatype  and string-literal is, well, you get the idea. :-) Here are some examples: 1. Date literal DATE '20...