问题
I am trying to calculate the time difference between two columns of a row which are of string data type. If the time difference between them is less than 2 hours then select the first column of that row else if the time difference is greater than 2 hours then select the second column of that row. It can be done by converting the columns to datetime format, but I want the result to be in string only. How can I do that? The data looks like this:
col1(string type)
2018-07-16 02:23:00
2018-07-26 12:26:00
2018-07-26 15:32:00
col2(string type)
2018-07-16 02:36:00
2018-07-26 14:29:00
2018-07-27 15:38:00
回答1:
I think you don't need to convert the columns to datetime format, since the data in your case is already ordered (yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss). You just need to take all the digits and take it into one string (yyyyMMddhhmmss) then you can apply your selection which is bigger or smaller than 2 hours (here 20000 since the hour is followed by mmss). By looking at your example (assuming col2 > col1), this query would work:
SELECT case when regexp_replace(col2,'[^0-9]', '')-regexp_replace(col1,'[^0-9]', '') < 20000 then col1 else col2 end as col3 from your_table;
回答2:
Use unix_timestamp() to convert string timestamp to seconds. The difference in hours will be:
hive> select (unix_timestamp('2018-07-16 02:23:00')- unix_timestamp('2018-07-16 02:36:00'))/60/60;
OK
-0.21666666666666667
Important update: this method will work correctly only if time zone is configured as UTC. Because for DST timezones for some marginal cases Hive converts time during timestamp operations. Consider this example for PDT time zone:
hive> select hour('2018-03-11 02:00:00');
OK
3
Note the hour is 3, not 2. This is because 2018-03-11 02:00:00 cannot exist in PDT time zone because exactly at 2018-03-11 02:00:00 time is adjusted and becomes 2018-03-11 03:00:00.
The same happens when converting to unix_timestamp. For PDT time zone unix_timestamp('2018-03-11 03:00:00') and unix_timestamp('2018-03-11 02:00:00') will return the same timestamp:
hive> select unix_timestamp('2018-03-11 03:00:00');
OK
1520762400
hive> select unix_timestamp('2018-03-11 02:00:00');
OK
1520762400
And few links for your reference:
https://community.hortonworks.com/questions/82511/change-default-timezone-for-hive.html
http://boristyukin.com/watch-out-for-timezones-with-sqoop-hive-impala-and-spark-2/
Also have a look at this jira please: Hive should carry out timestamp computations in UTC
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51590420/calculate-time-difference-between-two-columns-of-string-type-in-hive-without-cha