Oracle : how to subtract two dates and get minutes of the result

Question

I wrote this function to get minutes from a date, but I cannot get minutes between two dates, How to get that ?

FUNCTION get_minute(p_date DATE)
RETURN NUMB         


        

Answer 1

I think you can adapt the function to substract the two timestamps:

return  EXTRACT(MINUTE FROM 
  TO_TIMESTAMP(to_char(p_date1,'DD-MON-YYYY HH:MI:SS'),'DD-MON-YYYY HH24:MI:SS')
-
  TO_TIMESTAMP(to_char(p_date2,'DD-MON-YYYY HH:MI:SS'),'DD-MON-YYYY HH24:MI:SS')
);

I think you could simplify it by just using CAST(p_date as TIMESTAMP).

return  EXTRACT(MINUTE FROM cast(p_date1 as TIMESTAMP) - cast(p_date2 as TIMESTAMP));

Remember dates and timestamps are big ugly numbers inside Oracle, not what we see in the screen; we don't need to tell him how to read them. Also remember timestamps can have a timezone defined; not in this case.