newbie question with cursors/dates

Hi,

    I am very new to ORACLE coming from an Access developers background. I am trying to pull two dates from records in a table (called Hold_Red) and calculate total time elapsed. If any of the times overlap from any previous times, that amount of time must NOT be double counted. I am sure I need a cursor to pull out just the records that I need, but how do I set my inital values outside of the cursor? The inital variables should be equal to the first records values. I think my logic is correct from there, except that I do not understand how to use the date difference to calculate minutes. I thought if I subtracted the two and multiplied by the number of minutes in a day, I would get the value in minutes, but it always comes up with zero. This may ofcourse be because I do not have my variable initialized properly! Please help!
Thanks
S. Allsopp Received on Sun Mar 11 2001 - 12:28:25 CST