I'm trying to subtract date from Oracle so it even effect the day as well. For example, if the timestamp is 01/June/2015 00 hours and if I subtract 2 hours, I want to be able to go to to 31/May/2014 22 hours.
I tried
to_char(sysdate-(2/11), 'MM-DD-YYYY HH24')
but it only subtracts the hour; it does not touch the day itself.
This question is related to
sql
oracle
date-arithmetic
sysdate-(2/11)
A day consists of 24 hours. So, to subtract 2 hours from a day you need to divide it by 24:
DATE_value - 2/24
Using interval for the same:
DATE_value - interval '2' hour
Try this:
SELECT to_char(sysdate - (2 / 24), 'MM-DD-YYYY HH24') FROM DUAL
To test it using a new date instance:
SELECT to_char(TO_DATE('11/06/2015 00:00','dd/mm/yyyy HH24:MI') - (2 / 24), 'MM-DD-YYYY HH24:MI') FROM DUAL
Output is: 06-10-2015 22:00, which is the previous day.
you should divide hours by 24 not 11
like this:
select to_char(sysdate - 2/24, 'dd-mon-yyyy HH24') from dual
date - n will subtract n days form given date. In order to subtract hrs you need to convert it into day buy dividing it with 24. In your case it should be to_char(sysdate - (2 + 2/24), 'MM-DD-YYYY HH24'). This will subract 2 days and 2 hrs from sysdate.
Others have commented on the (incorrect) use of 2/11 to specify the desired interval.
I personally however prefer writing things like that using ANSI interval literals which makes reading the query much easier:
sysdate - interval '2' hour
It also has the advantage of being portable, many DBMS support this. Plus I don't have to fire up a calculator to find out how many hours the expression means - I'm pretty bad with mental arithmetics ;)
Source: Stackoverflow.com