Is There A Way To Retreive Data By Combining Two Columns!

Question

Hi Everybody!
The four feilds say Date1,Date2,Date3,Date4 Date1 and Date3 are date datatypes Date2 and Date4 are Char Datatypes.
I want to find out the date difference as follows
Date1=29-jun-2001
Date2=13:00:00
Date3=29-jun-2001
Date4=13:10:34
is there any option to write a query to get the date difference
yours truly
Nagaraju

Answer 1

Assuming that Date1 and Date3 don't contain a time component, then the expression :-
to_date(to_char(Date1, 'dd-Mon-yyyy') || ' ' || Date2, 'dd-Mon-yyyy hh24:mi:ss')
to_date(to_char(Date3, 'dd-Mon-yyyy') || ' ' || Date4, 'dd-Mon-yyyy hh24:mi:ss')
will give the number of days' difference between Date3+Date4
and Date1+Date2.
Plugging in your data would give .007337963.
And then you could convert that to hours, minutes and seconds.
An example follows of a script to do that :-
-- x.sql
-- =====
-- convert decimal number into
-- days, hours, minutes, seconds
set feedback off verify off serveroutput on size 1000000;
declare
input_number number :=0.;
num_days pls_integer :=0;
num_hours pls_integer :=0;
num_mins pls_integer :=0;
num_secs number :=0.;
leftover number :=0.;
begin
input_number := &1;
num_days := trunc(input_number);
leftover := input_number - num_days;
num_hours := trunc(leftover * 24);
leftover := (leftover * 24) - num_hours;
num_mins := trunc(leftover * 60);
leftover := (leftover * 60) - num_mins;
num_secs := round((leftover * 60), 2);
dbms_output.put_line(to_char(num_days) || ' days, ' ||
to_char(num_hours) || ' hours, ' ||
to_char(num_mins) || ' mins, ' ||
to_char(num_secs) || ' secs');
exception
when others then
dbms_output.put_line(sqlerrm);
end;
hope this helps