Re: formatting intervals with to_char

On 10/4/06, Graham Davis <gdavis(at)refractions(dot)net> wrote:
>
> I haven't heard any replies from this, so in the meantime I've found a
> hacky way to get the output I desire. I'm basically calculating the
> hours on the fly and piecing together a formatted string with
> concatenations like this:
>
> SELECT
> (((EXTRACT(day from time_idle)*24)+EXTRACT(hour from time_idle)) || ':' ||
> EXTRACT(minute from time_idle) || ':' || EXTRACT(second from
> time_idle))::interval AS myinterval
> FROM
> ( SELECT ('2006-09-15T23:59:00'::timestamp - '2006-09-01
> 09:30:41'::timestamp) AS time_idle) FROM_TABLE;
>
> If anyone knows a better/proper way to get this result, let me know.

That would be my approach though you could also replace:

EXTRACT(minute from time_idle) || ':' || EXTRACT(second from time_idle)

with:

to_char(time_idle, ':MM:SS')

If you really want to clean up your SQL you could create a function that
takes any timestamp and then make the function IMMUTABLE to tell postgresql
it doesn't need to rederive the results every time.

==================================================================
Aaron Bono
Aranya Software Technologies, Inc.
http://www.aranya.com
http://codeelixir.com
==================================================================