I thought the default Oracle format was DD-MON-YYYY, as in '06-JAN-2004'. I think that's the way dates come out in DB2 also. Actually, I think that is some kind of standard.
Anyway, if you have a
string in a particular format, you can convert in Oracle using the TO_DATE and TO_CHAR functions.
For example, if you have a string that looks like '06-JAN-2004', and you want to display a string that looks like '01/06/04', you could
1) Convert the string to a Date with TO_DATE( string, 'DD-MON-YYYY')
2) Convert the Date back to a string with TO_CHAR( date, 'MM/DD/YY')
Putting it all together, it looks like this: