Question

There are many question posted about getting the difference between two dates in Oracle. My question is requires the query to do a couple more things.

Here’s how far I have got at the moment

select m_bug_t.date_submitted, m_bug_history_t.date_modified
from m_bug_t, m_bug_history_t
where m_bug_t.id = m_bug_history_t.bug_id
and field_name = 'status'
and new_value = '100'

So far I get a set of date pairs returned like this

date_submitted | date_modified
1314894774     | 1315906468
...
...

I want to convert these numbers to dates, find the difference between them and then get the minimum of all the results. I want the difference to be represented as days.

Any ideas how you do this?

Thanks very much :).

Answer 1

Well, Unix timestamps are expressed as a number of seconds since 01 Jan 1970, so if you subtract one from the other you get the difference in seconds. The difference in days is then simply a matter of dividing by the number of seconds in a day:

(date_modified - date_submitted) / (24*60*60)

or

(date_modified - date_submitted) / 86400