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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T22:59:48+00:00

I am struggling with an SQL time comparison on two fields that have been

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I am struggling with an SQL time comparison on two fields that have been set up as integers, rather than time stamps.

I have some performance metrics in a database that the developer originally set up as int(8). The database contains the start and end times of a transaction. For example

Some sample data may be

id | start_time | end_time
---------------------------
1  |      85958 | 90001

If I simply subtracted the two values, I would get 4043 seconds, when the transaction time is only 3. I am struggling however to convert the values into a time format that allows me to perform date comparisons.

I am unable to do this calculation within the application, because there are 100’s of rows in the database per day, and I am trying to calculate the average and max times for the transactions.

EDIT:

To clarify

The times are in seconds
85958 represent 8:59:58 90001 represents 9:00:01

To make things worse, 1 minute past midnight 0:01:00 would be represented as 100.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Most of the answers already described are all valid, but unfortunately the iSeries seems to quibble over different functions and so I had to tailor the answers given to get it to work.

    The final solution I got was


    select
    TIME(SUBSTR(DIGITS(END_TIME),1,2) CONCAT ':' CONCAT SUBSTR(DIGITS(END_TIME),3,2) CONCAT ':' CONCAT SUBSTR(DIGITS(END_TIME),5,2)) - TIME(SUBSTR(DIGITS(START_TIME),1,2) CONCAT ':' CONCAT SUBSTR(DIGITS(START_TIME),3,2) CONCAT ':' CONCAT SUBSTR(DIGITS(START_TIME),5,2))
    from table1;

    Thanks for all the quick and detailed responses

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