title: Does Oracle's "date'[yyyy-mm-dd]'" literal always use the yyyy-mm-dd pattern?
body: <p>Rephrased, given I use date like so:</p>
  
  <pre><code>date'2010-04-10'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>, could the outcome be anything but April 10th 2010 (e.g. October 4th 2010)?</p>
  
  <p>UPDATE I hear what you, and the docs, say. But...</p>
  
  <p>When a batch job runs, with hard-coded date'yyyy-mm-dd':s, it fails for some (non-deterministic) calculations. Running the failing SQL statements in PL/SQL Developer <em>never</em> yields the same, incorrect, value.</p>
  
  <p>First, I ran the same calculations (hundreds of thousands) with the date'' date literals replaced with the to_date('', '') function, and everything worked just fine.</p>
  
  <p>Then, I used NHibernate and its LINQ provider, and replaced the hand-crafted SQL altogether. ... and everything worked just fine... NHibernate produces a '' date literal, with the time part included, BTW.</p>
  
  <p>UPDATE A colleague of mine wrote some code, that can reproduce the error in our environment. He posted his findings (including the code) at Oracle Forums: <a href="https://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=2304569&amp;tstart=0" rel="nofollow">https://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=2304569&amp;tstart=0</a></p>
  
  <p>UPDATE Changed the title according to zerkms' answer.</p>