With DATE, you no longer have to worry about one date field being defined as YYMMDD and another as MMDDYY or MM/DD/YY, and whether they are stored in binary, packed decimal, display, or alphanumeric format. All SQL DATEs are stored the same way internally, so that any DATE column can be compared to any other DATE column.

SQL DATEs can be entered or displayed in several formats, but it is stores internally so that it includes the century, year, month, and day such as ‘CCYY-MM-DD’ (with a length of 10).

A DATE column must have a valid date and can not be blank. If the columns are defined as allowing nulls, then NULL should be used for a missing date. Valid values are from ’0001-01-01′ to ’9999-12-31′.

Example:    COL1 DATE

Notice that the keyword, DATE, is a complete definition of the data type and has no value defined in parentheses.
See Sample Data Type Values.

Sample value is: ’2056-02-20′