"Delta" or "elapsed" time column in Oracle

Hello all. I browsed through the Oracle groups looking for an answer to this and I found it asked before but in different circumstances.

I am trying to use a column to store just a time with no date. The other posters that I saw were told to just make sure the date is the same for all columns and use a normal date column. However, it appeared to me that most people that asked the question were looking for an absolute time-- i.e. 12:17AM and they just don't care about the date. I am looking to store an elapsed time, like 47 minutes and 20 seconds.

I am trying to store race results and am therefore looking for a column type to store a value that I can easily do computations on. For example, "What is the mean time for all runners that are male and between the ages of 17 and 24?" or "select all runners where finish time is between 45 minutes and 50 minutes".

The times I am loading into the table are ascii and in 'hh:mi:ss' format.

I would appreciate some recommendations based on the queries I mentioned. I can easily write a program to convert the times to seconds and use an integer column, but I don't know if that is a good way to go. Any suggestions?

Thanks. Received on Wed Jun 02 2004 - 05:10:09 CDT