Re: Determining period between 2 dates

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 10:47 AM, Thom Brown <thom@linux.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm wondering what people think of introducing some kind of function
> to extract the number of units between 2 dates?  At the moment there's
> no way to do this.  Take the following example:
>
> Event 1 is '1985-10-26 01:22:00'
> Event 2 is now.
>
> How many minutes between these 2 events?  What I don't want is how
> many years, months, days and hours there are between them.
>
> This could potentially involve implementing age(timestamp, timestamp,
> interval), like:
>
> postgres=# SELECT age(current_date, '1985-10-26 01:22:00'::timestamp,
> '1 second') as age_in_seconds;
>  age_in_seconds
> ----------------
>      798733367
> (1 row)
>
>  Is this easily done?

How about something like this:

rhaas=# select (extract('epoch' from now()) - extract('epoch' from
timestamptz '1985-10-26 01:22:00')) / 60;    ?column?
------------------13311989.7435394
(1 row)

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company