On Fri, Jan 11, 2019 at 4:25 PM Rob Sargent <robjsargent@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > We don't have more context in "activities.sql" but if your OP was > verbatim, it's keeling over on the comma ending the long text string. > Something syntactically askew I think. If the problem was where you described the parser would never have gotten to the point of trying to pass an empty string to a date constructor resulting in a runtime error. It would have failed at compile time with a very different error probably relating to "malformed statement" or "unexpected identifier". The OP provided sufficient detail (though an actual complete failing command would have been nice) to pinpoint the misunderstanding that the empty string and null are not the same thing at that converting the empty string to a date is not possible (i.e., it doesn't just silently return null for invalid input, one must pass in null explicitly if one wishes to construct a date typed null.) David J.