Speed Dating – NLS_DATE FORMAT in Oracle

When dealing with dates in a program, I’ll tend to err on the side of caution and explicitly do the conversion from a varchar to a date, specifying the format so there’s no chance of anything unexpected happening if the program should run in a session with a different NLS_DATE_FORMAT from that I’m using.
However, if for example, I need to do a one-off data fix, sometimes, I just can’t be bothered with all that typing.