Re: Subtract timestamps, result with fractions of seconds

Hi Michael,

currently the support for calculations of sub-seconds or fractions of seconds is rather shallow.

What you could do is something like this:

createcolumntable times (one_time timestamp, another_time timestamp);

insertinto times values (to_timestamp(now()),NULL);

update times set another_time = to_timestamp(now());

select * from times;

/*

ONE_TIME ANOTHER_TIME          

15.04.2013 10:49:17.216 15.04.2013 10:49:35.000

*/

select

    TO_SECONDDATE (one_time),

    TO_SECONDDATE (another_time),

    TO_INTEGER(TO_VARCHAR (one_time, 'FF7')) as one_time_fraction,

    TO_INTEGER(TO_VARCHAR (another_time, 'FF7')) as another_time_fraction

from

times;

/*

TO_SECONDDATE(ONE_TIME) TO_SECONDDATE(ANOTHER_TIME) ONE_TIME_FRACTION   ANOTHER_TIME_FRACTION

15.04.2013 10:49:17.000 15.04.2013 10:49:35.000     2.160.000           0                   

*/

I guess you could take this from here.

Anyhow, having the fraction available as an integer value is obviously just half of the story.

You would need to deal with over/underflows of the fractional seconds part yourself in your coding.

Not too nice ...

Maybe you'd be better off (at least for the time being) to implement your time stamps/intervals with a different data type (e.g. bigint) for data storage.

- Lars