DATEDIFF IN ORACLE - Online Tech Support

How To Find in Oracle Date Difference

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This online tutorial page is based on examples to be easier to follow. Now about the Oracle Date type; there are many different ways to use the Oracle Date type for calculations and one of them is subtracting. The output below returns the value in number of days as it is in the following example:

SELECT (SYSDATE+1) - SYSDATE AS Days
  FROM DUAL;

Doing subtraction with the dates the Oracle datediff will return a number in a day unit. To turn it in hours we need to multiply with 24 hours. As it is written in the next example.

SELECT ((SYSDATE+1) - SYSDATE) * 24 AS Hours
  FROM DUAL;

To change the result in minutes you will need to multiply the result above with 60 minutes. The following SQL query will return the date diff Oracle in minutes by multiply the result with 60 minutes.

SELECT ((SYSDATE+1) - SYSDATE) * 24 * 60 AS Minutes
  FROM DUAL;

The fourth Online Tech Support example with Oracle date diff will return the date result in seconds (multiply the result with 60 seconds).

SELECT ((SYSDATE+1) - SYSDATE) * 24 * 60 * 60 AS Seconds
  FROM DUAL;

This example is how to find the differences in months Online Tech Support will use function MONTHS_BETWEEN that gives us the final result.

SELECT TRUNC(MONTHS_BETWEEN(SYSDATE,(SYSDATE-60))) AS Months
  FROM DUAL;

The next date calculation is to find amount of years. You would need to convert the number of days in an amount of month and after to convert it to years by dividing it with 12 months. See the example below:

SELECT TRUNC( MONTHS_BETWEEN(SYSDATE,(SYSDATE-600)) /12 ) AS Years
  FROM DUAL;

The last things is to finding out the date difference in years, months and days together and that will make the query more complicated. See the query below:

SELECT TRUNC(MONTHS_BETWEEN(SYSDATE,(SYSDATE-600))/12) AS Years,
       MOD(TRUNC(MONTHS_BETWEEN(SYSDATE,(SYSDATE-600))),12) AS Months,
       SYSDATE - ADD_MONTHS(
         (SYSDATE-600),TRUNC(MONTHS_BETWEEN(SYSDATE,(SYSDATE-600)))
       ) AS Days
 FROM DUAL;

To use more date diff Oracle functions find out below the date format Oracle date masks and using oracle interval functions the date calculating will look more clear and easier to read.

How To Use Oracle Date Difference With MS Excel

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This topic could be quite challenging for many Oracle database users but the solution is not too complicated at all. Let’s start with the use of The Oracle Date type for calculations and the first example is about subtracting. The output will be returned in number of days and that is suitable for MS Excel. Take a look at the following example:

SELECT (SYSDATE+1) - SYSDATE AS Days
  FROM DUAL;

The subtraction with the dates returned number 1 as we did mention above this is in day units. To show these in Excel just copy the number into a cell on a sheet as on the picture below.

Now doing a right click on the cell and select option “Forma Cells…”

From the Format Cells window select the Custom category and since we are dealing with days the option would be something with “dd” and etc. This example option is “dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm“.

The following output “01/01/1900 00:00” does not make much sense because Microsoft Excel replaces missing date values with the Excel default ones. For example the output year 1900 is default and we did not copied it over from Oracle database. To give more sense Orace date difference with Excel we should use time units as on the next example.

The SYSDATE functions can make to return different values with using additional Oracle Interval function. The first date has additional 10 minutes added to the current time as on the example below.

SELECT (SYSDATE + INTERVAL '10' MINUTE) - SYSDATE AS ORACE_DATEDIFF
  FROM DUAL;

The output is showing a 10 minutes difference in day units and the number is 0.006944444444444444444444444444444444444444. To make the number more readable in Excel follow the same steps above as we did with the different days. There is one exception the displaying units should be only time units. The steps with different time units are brought out as following too.

Copy the value into Excel cell as on the following picture.

In the forma cell set the category to Custom and type to “hh:mm:ss“.

On the picture below the 0.006944444444 number makes more sense in time units displaying the 10 minutes difference (00:10:00).

The example above can be used with all Oracle time difference units like seconds, minutes and hours. The MS Excel can represent the numbers more understandable way with just four easy steps.