title: change postgres date format
body: <p>Is there a way to change the default format of a date in Postgres?</p>
  
  <p>Normally when I query a Postgres database, dates come out as yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss+tz, like 2011-02-21 11:30:00-05.</p>
  
  <p>But one particular program the dates come out yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss.s, that is, there is no time zone and it shows tenths of a second.</p>
  
  <p>Apparently something is changing the default date format, but I don't know what or where. I don't think it's a server-side configuration parameter, because I can access the same database with a different program and I get the format with the timezone.</p>
  
  <p>I care because it appears to be ignoring my "set timezone" calls in addition to changing the format. All times come out EST.</p>
  
  <p>Additional info:</p>
  
  <p>If I write "select somedate from sometable" I get the "no timezone" format. But if I write "select to_char(somedate::timestamptz, 'yyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss-tz')" then timezones work as I would expect.</p>
  
  <p>This really sounds to me like something is setting all timestamps to implicitly be "to_char(date::timestamp, 'yyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss.m')". But I can't find anything in the documentation about how I would do this if I wanted to, nor can I find anything in the code that appears to do this. Though as I don't know what to look for, that doesn't prove much.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Never mind :'(</strong></p>
  
  <p>I found my problem. I was thinking that I was looking directly at the string coming back from the database. But I was overlooking that it was reading it as a Timestamp and then converting the Timestamp to a string. This was buried inside a function called "getString", which is what threw me off. I was thinking it was ResultSet.getString, but it was really our own function with the same name. Oops. What idiot wrote that function?! Oh, it was me ...</p>
  
  <p>Thanks to all who tried to help. I'll give you each an upvote for your trouble.</p>