Changing Oracle’s Default Date Format

If you are stuck using Oracle’s SQL Developer like I am (Toad is $800 now!), then don’t suffer with the braindead default date format like I have until recently.  There’s nothing like just seeing the date in dd-mmm-yy format when you are working with hourly or sub-hourly data all the time like I am.  What were they thinking?  Anyway, you can run this once in your SQL worksheet and enter and see dates with times:

alter session set NLS_DATE_FORMAT='MM/DD/YYYY HH24:MI';