Hi
Unlike SAS Oracle has a lot of different field types.
If the field type in Oracle is date or datetime then it should translate correctly to a SAS datetime format.
What I've seen already is that people store a date in a numeric field (as a number and not as a date), let's say 20100618.
If this is the case then SAS can't know that this field should be interpreted as a date but reads it simply as a number. If you want to convert such a field to a date or datetime then you have to either do this in SAS (with format, informat) or if you're using pass through SQL you can also convert the field already in Oracle using the appropriate formats there.
I believe to remember that in Oracle dates start from 1January1970.
HTH
Patrick