Question

I want to display for the user how long ago this record was added. (Like “0 Days 5 Hours 6 Min.”) so i need to take the total number of min. and make the math. I did it in c# but now I need to do it in sql syntax, is there a easy way to do that?

UPDATE:
Thanks to @Andomar answer here I got it to work as a separate query, Now I need to add it to a big view of the calls table..

 select case when days > 0 then CAST(Days as varchar(6)) +  ' Days ' else +  
        case when hours > 1 and hours < 24 then cast(hours as varchar(6)) + ' hours'
         when hours > 1 and hours < 24  then '1 hour'
         else '' 
    end + ' ' +
    case when minutes > 1 and minutes < 60 then cast(minutes as varchar(6)) + ' minutes'
         when minutes = 1 then '1 min.'
         else '' 
    end 
    end as TimeOpen
    From   (
    select  datediff(HH, dbo.Calls.CallDate, getdate()) as hours
    ,       datediff(MI, dbo.Calls.CallDate,getdate()) % 60 as minutes
    ,       datediff(D, dbo.Calls.CallDate, getdate()) as Days
    from    calls where Status <> 7 and Status <> 4
    ) as SubQuery

Answer 1

You can find the differences in hours like:

datediff(hour, startdate, enddate)

And the remainder of minutes:

datediff(minutes, startdate, enddate) % 60

Combined, it would look like:

select  cast(datediff(hour, startdate, enddate) as varchar(20)) + ' hours ' + 
        cast(datediff(minutes, startdate, enddate) % 60 as varchar(20) + ' min.'

To do conditional formatting, you could use a subquery:

select  case when hours > 1 then cast(hours as varchar(6)) + ' hours'
             when hours > 1 then '1 hour'
             else '' 
        end + ' ' +
        case when minutes > 1 then cast(minutes as varchar(6)) + ' minutes'
             when minutes = 1 then '1 minute'
             else '0 minutes'
        end
from    (
        select  datediff(hour, startdate, enddate) as hours
        ,       datediff(minutes, startdate, enddate) % 60 as minutes
        from    YourTable
        ) as SubQueryAlias

I’ll leave adding days as an exercise for the reader 😉