ORACLE Date won’t work with greater or lesser than operator

I was having problem making one of my SQL query work in ORACLE until I realize that I got the check on the date wrong. It seem that Oracle didn’t interpreted my query has I expected when handling a date with a greater or lesser than operator (< or >).

So this won’t work :

date_and_time <= '01-DEC-02'

After some digging I’ve found out that there is

But this will :

to_date('01-DEC-2002','dd-mmm-yyyy');

The

TO_TIMESTAMP can be used to, check the reference for more information: TO_TIMESTAMP reference and TO_DATE Reference