What is the Oracle date formatting mask for time zones?

I need to insert a date format from an outside source which includes the three le开发者_开发问答tter code for time zone, but the TZD formatting mask does not seem to work...

insert into blah
    values (to_date('Thu, 18 Feb 2010 08:37:00 EST','Dy, DD Mon YYYY HH24:MI:SS TZD'));

ORA-01821: date format not recognized

If I remove the "TZD"...

insert into blah
    values (to_date('Thu, 18 Feb 2010 08:37:00','Dy, DD Mon YYYY HH24:MI:SS'));

1 row created.

What is the proper mask for such an insert statement in Oracle?

desc blah
 Name                      Null?    Type
 ----------------------------------------- -------- ----------------------------
 D                          DATE

Edit: I changed the table column from DATE type to TIMESTAMP type and got the same error.

Date columns don't have timezone as an option. You'd have to create the column as data type TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONEorTIMESTAMP WITH LOCAL TIME ZONE, and besides, the TO_DATE function doesn't understand the TIME ZONE format mask you're applying.

SQL> CREATE TABLE T
  2  (DT DATE,
  3   TS TIMESTAMP,
  4   TSTZ TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE,
  5   TSLTZ TIMESTAMP WITH LOCAL TIME ZONE);

Table created.

SQL> INSERT INTO T (TSLTZ) VALUES 
  2  (to_timestamp_tz('Thu, 18 Feb 2010 08:37:00 EST','DY, DD Mon YYYY HH24:MI:SS TZD'))
  3  /

1 row created.

SQL> INSERT INTO T (TSTZ) VALUES 
  2  (to_timestamp_tz('Thu, 18 Feb 2010 08:37:00 EST','DY, DD Mon YYYY HH24:MI:SS TZD'))
  3  /

1 row created.

If timezone is not relevant for you, just strip it from the string using SUBSTR function and insert as in your second example.