Re: SQL Problem

> As a question and not really involved in this topic, would you not use
to_date on a date if you only wanted the month portion or even the
month/year portion? i.e. to_date(v.vtran_effective_date, 'Mon-YYYY').

No, you would use TO_CHAR(v.vtran_effective_date, 'Mon-YYYY')

TO_DATE takes a DATE and converts it to a VARCHAR2
TO_CHAR takes a VARCHAR2 and converts it to a DATE

Whenever you do TO_DATE(date_value) you are IMPLICITLY doing TO_DATE
(TO_CHAR(date_value)), and the implicit TO_CHAR is done with the default 
format mask (e.g. DD-MON-YYYY).  In fact, your example above will fail 
with the error "ORA-01843: not a valid month" - UNLESS your default format 
mask just happens to be 'MON-YYYY' also, which is very unlikely!

You can also use TRUNC with a format mask on dates to return dates, e.g.
TRUNC(sysdate,'MM') will return the DATE value 01-FEB-2003
TRUNC(sysdate,'YYYY') will return the DATE value 01-JAN-2003

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