In Oracle, is there a function that calculates the difference between two Dates?

Question

In Oracle, is there a function that calculates the difference between two Dates? If not, is a way to display the difference between two dates in hours and minutes?

Answer 1

You can subtract two dates in Oracle. The result is a FLOAT which represents the number of days between the two dates. You can do simple arithmetic on the fractional part to calculate the hours, minutes and seconds.

Here's an example:

SELECT TO_DATE('2000/01/02:12:00:00PM', 'yyyy/mm/dd:hh:mi:ssam')-TO_DATE('2000/01/01:12:00:00AM', 'yyyy/mm/dd:hh:mi:ssam') DAYS FROM DUAL

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