Re: Date / Time

Sajid Iqbal wrote:
>
> Hello All
>
> I want to display the "time elapsed" between two dates - in days, hours,
> minutes and seconds.
>
> If I do "select date1 - date2", the result is : 12.0194907
>
> Is there a function that will turn the number of days into something more
> legible? Ideally i'd like to do ;
>
> "to_char(12.0194907,'DD:HH:MI:SS')" but obviously that won't work. Is
> there a solution other than writing a complex function myself which will
> have to * by 24, / by 60 and substr etc to get the different bits of the
> number?
>
> Please CC any replies directly to me at siqbal_at_vianetworks.co.uk
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Saj.
>
> --
> Sajid Iqbal
> Database Team Leader

Sajid,

   The difference of two dates is a number of days. If you want to use a function similar to the dates function, you have to treat the day and fractional parts separately, eg

 select trunc(date2 - date1) days,

        to_char(trunc(sysdate) + (date2 - date1) - trunc(date2 - date1),
                 'HH24:MI')

 This uses a trick, the fact that date + number is a date ('number' is assumed to be a number of days) - so we can use 0:00 today as 'base' and just display hours and minutes (and seconds if you need them).

--
Regards,

  Stephane Faroult
  Oriole Corporation
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Author: Stephane Faroult
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