Re: Another date / time question

On Fri, Mar 26, 2004 at 12:21:59 -0500,
Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> "Vanole, Mike" <mike(dot)vanole(at)attws(dot)com> writes:
> > I'm trying to query two timestamp(0) columns to determine elapsed time. I u=
> > se the age() function which works fine, but I want to return the informatio=
> > n in MINUTES.=20
>
> Just subtract (giving an interval), use extract(epoch) to get the
> interval in seconds, then divide by 60 and round (or truncate if you
> prefer).

To expand on this, while age returns an interval, it will include
a months part in the interval (if the timestamps are over of month apart)
and this will mess up your calculation. When you just subtract, you will
get an absolute time difference that you can reliably convert to minutes.