Re: question about postgresql time intervals

On Wednesday 15 March 2006 8:13 pm, Tom Lane wrote:
> Michael Glaesemann <grzm(at)myrealbox(dot)com> writes:
> > On Mar 15, 2006, at 23:39 , Linda wrote:
> >> According to the SQL standard, shouldn't this work?
> >>
> >> select '506:47:04'::interval day to second ;
>
> > No one has implemented this in PostgreSQL yet.
>
> It depends on what you define as "work". 8.1 says
>
> regression=# select '506:47:04'::interval day to second ;
> interval
> -----------
> 506:47:04
> (1 row)
>
> 8.0 and before say
>
> regression=# select '506:47:04'::interval day to second ;
> interval
> ------------------
> 21 days 02:47:04
> (1 row)
>
> because before 8.1 we didn't distinguish intervals of "1 day" and "24
hours"
> as being different. But the syntax has been accepted for a long time,
> at least back to 7.0.
>
> If there's some specific functionality you're after, you should say what
> it is rather than expecting us to guess what you mean.
>

Hi, Tom

Thanks for your reply. I guess you missed the original email. I have an
application that is retrieving "uptime" (an integer number of seconds since
reboot) and recasting it as varchar and then interval type. For example,

select (1824459::varchar)::interval;

Which in previous versions of Postgres returned '21 days 02:47:39'. If I
use "justify_hours" the application will not run on older versions of
Postgres, and will not be portable to other DBs. I thought perhaps some
"datestyle" setting was different or some other factor that I was
overlooking. I am trying to find a generic way to get the same output on
newer versions of PostgreSQL.

Thanks,
Linda

> regards, tom lane
>

--
Linda Gray
Unitrends Corporation
803.454.0300 ext. 241