Adrian: On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 11:19 PM Adrian Klaver <adrian.klaver@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 9/11/19 9:34 AM, Francisco Olarte wrote: ... > > If you want to know the elapsed minutes between two timestamps, it > > might be better to do it directly, extract the epoch from both ( > > seconds ), substract, divide by 60 truncating/rounding if you need to. .... > > test=# select extract(epoch from age('2019.11.20 > > 20:00:00'::timestamptz, '2019.06.10 10:00:00'::timestamptz)) as > > interval_seconds; > > interval_seconds > > ------------------ > > 13860000 > > (1 row) > > > > test=# select extract(epoch from '2019.11.20 20:00:00'::timestamptz) - > > extract(epoch from '2019.06.10 10:00:00'::timestamptz) as > > elapsed_seconds; > > elapsed_seconds > > ----------------- > > 14122800 > > (1 row) > > Epoch is not the issue, age() is. Leave age() out of it: Well, I did not point to age as the problem assuming it was clear in the examples I gave. Two usages of epoch, one with other without age. > set timezone = 'Europe/Madrid'; > > test=# select extract(epoch from '2019.11.20 20:00:00'::timestamptz) - > test-# extract(epoch from '2019.06.10 10:00:00'::timestamptz) as > test-# elapsed_seconds; > elapsed_seconds > ----------------- > 14122800 > test=# select extract(epoch from '2019.11.20 20:00:00'::timestamptz > -'2019.06.10 10:00:00'::timestamptz) as > elapsed_seconds; > elapsed_seconds > ----------------- > 14122800 > (1 row) Ah, I see your point now. The problem is age and substraction gives different invervals. >cdrs=# select '2019.11.20 20:00:00'::timestamptz -'2019.06.10 10:00:00'::timestamptz as diff_interval; diff_interval ------------------- 163 days 11:00:00 (1 row) cdrs=# select age('2019.11.20 20:00:00'::timestamptz, '2019.06.10 10:00:00'::timestamptz) as age_interval; age_interval ------------------------- 5 mons 10 days 10:00:00 (1 row) And I see it still translate it to normalized days. I still prefer substracting epoch values, as the 163d/11h seems really tricky to work with, and it took me a time to parse & diff your queries against mines, they all looked the same. It seems like PG does date substraction by substracting epochs and converting to a normalized interval, I prefer to go to number of seconds directly when working with "elapsed time"as otherwise I get confused. I mean something like this ( using it just to show the differences ): cdrs=# select (extract(epoch from '2019.11.20 20:00:00'::timestamptz) - extract(epoch from '2019.06.10 10:00:00'::timestamptz)) * '1 second'::interval as pure_seconds_interval; pure_seconds_interval ----------------------- 3923:00:00 (1 row) A third representation! which gives the same result for epoch, but I'm not sure it does for arithmetic....( tested it, it does not ) I thought substraction would give me that, clearly it does not ( both give the same when using epoch, as lacking tz info it has to assume something, and it seems to assume no dst changes ). timestamp / interval arithmetic is really a hairy thing. ( As shown below, start point carefully taken to avoid crossing dsts ) cdrs=# select x, '2019.11.20 20:00:00'::timestamptz + x::interval as sum from ( values ('5 mons 10 days 10:00:00'),('163 days 11:00:00'),('3923:00:00')) as v(x); x | sum -------------------------+------------------------ 5 mons 10 days 10:00:00 | 2020-05-01 06:00:00+02 163 days 11:00:00 | 2020-05-02 07:00:00+02 3923:00:00 | 2020-05-02 08:00:00+02 (3 rows) Francisco Olarte.