Oracle : how to subtract two dates and get minutes of the result

Question

I wrote this function to get minutes from a date, but I cannot get minutes between two dates, How to get that ?

FUNCTION get_minute(p_date DATE)
RETURN NUMB         


        

Answer 1

I think you can adapt the function to substract the two timestamps:

return  EXTRACT(MINUTE FROM 
  TO_TIMESTAMP(to_char(p_date1,'DD-MON-YYYY HH:MI:SS'),'DD-MON-YYYY HH24:MI:SS')
-
  TO_TIMESTAMP(to_char(p_date2,'DD-MON-YYYY HH:MI:SS'),'DD-MON-YYYY HH24:MI:SS')
);

I think you could simplify it by just using CAST(p_date as TIMESTAMP).

return  EXTRACT(MINUTE FROM cast(p_date1 as TIMESTAMP) - cast(p_date2 as TIMESTAMP));

Remember dates and timestamps are big ugly numbers inside Oracle, not what we see in the screen; we don't need to tell him how to read them. Also remember timestamps can have a timezone defined; not in this case.

Answer 2

For those who want to substrat two timestamps (instead of dates), there is a similar solution:

SELECT ( CAST( date2 AS DATE ) - CAST( date1 AS DATE ) ) * 1440 AS minutesInBetween
FROM ...

or

SELECT ( CAST( date2 AS DATE ) - CAST( date1 AS DATE ) ) * 86400 AS secondsInBetween
FROM ...

Answer 3

I can handle this way:

select to_number(to_char(sysdate,'MI')) - to_number(to_char(*YOUR_DATA_VALUE*,'MI')),max(exp_time)  from ...

Or if you want to the hour just change the MI;

select to_number(to_char(sysdate,'HH24')) - to_number(to_char(*YOUR_DATA_VALUE*,'HH24')),max(exp_time)  from ...

the others don't work for me. Good luck.

Answer 4

When you subtract two dates in Oracle, you get the number of days between the two values. So you just have to multiply to get the result in minutes instead:

SELECT (date2 - date1) * 24 * 60 AS minutesBetween
FROM ...