Question

I have to generate time values (minutes) between 5 and 30.The code should work and generate 5-30 minutes but instead of that I get 5-30 seconds:

update table1
set column1 = 5+FLOOR(RAND()*26);

column1 is a TIME column

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

If you are just storing a number of seconds or minutes then you are not storing a ‘time’ so column1 should not be a time type…

If you want whole minutes (in seconds)

update table1 set column1 = (5+FLOOR(RAND()*26)) * 60;

If you want partial minutes (in seconds)

update table1 set column1 = (5*60)+FLOOR(RAND()*26*60);

If you just want a whole number of minutes (5 to 30) then your original query should be fine once you change the column type to int