String to date in Oracle with milliseconds

Oracle stores only the fractions up to second in a DATE field.

Use TIMESTAMP instead:

SELECT  TO_TIMESTAMP('2004-09-30 23:53:48,140000000', 'YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS,FF9')
FROM    dual

, possibly casting it to a DATE then:

SELECT  CAST(TO_TIMESTAMP('2004-09-30 23:53:48,140000000', 'YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS,FF9') AS DATE)
FROM    dual