UTC timestamps in milliseconds offset from January 1, 1970

Question

Hello,
The problem is that I must generate miliseconds offset from jan-1-1970 for a java app from my PL/SQL application.
how do I can, from a given datetime, get UTC timestamps in milliseconds offset from January 1, 1970?
I'm in the Canada/Eastern time zone and I'm using the following function:
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION date_to_float (dt IN DATE)
RETURN FLOAT
IS
BEGIN
RETURN 24 * 3600 * 1000 * (NEW_TIME (dt, 'EDT', 'GMT') - TO_DATE ('1970-01-01', 'YYYY-MM-DD'));
END;
so when I use this function to generate events after the november 2nd, the hour isn't accurate on the application side because the static usage of new_time with EDT source timezone.
How can I make this function reliable over time?
Thanks

Answer 1

It looks like you are looking for the unix style epoch time:
This code will give it to you plus allow you to configure the resolution, by default it will return the number of seconds since 1-Jan-1970, but by varying either the scale or precision you can get more or less detail, and you can even change the date epoch date used in the calculation.
create or replace
function date_to_epoch(
      p_date timestamp with time zone default systimestamp,
      p_scale number default 1,
      p_precision number default 0,
      epoch timestamp with time zone
          default to_timestamp_tz('1970-01-01 utc',
                                  'yyyy-mm-dd tzr')
  ) return number is
    tmp interval day(9) to second;
    sec number;
  begin
    tmp := p_date-epoch;
    sec := extract(day from tmp)*24*60*60;
    sec := sec + extract(hour from tmp)*60*60;
    sec := sec + extract(minute from tmp)*60;
    sec := sec + extract(second from tmp);
    return trunc(sec*p_scale,p_precision);
  end;Edited by: Sentinel on Aug 28, 2008 3:14 PM