Time remaining

Firkrag

Can someone tell me how to do this:
I have a datetime value in database '2007-11-23 18:51:55'
I don't want to get the value itself, but a string that would show how much time remains from now to that time in db, for example something like this: '10 days, 10 hours, 10minutes, 10seconds'. I couldn't find any mysql functions that would do this correctly. I am using mysql 5.0

TheDefender

DATE_SUB

Sxooter

For databases that support intervals (mysql 5.1, all versions of pgsql, oracle 9 and up) you can do it easily:

=# create table abc (i timestamp);
CREATE TABLE
=# insert into abc values ('2007-11-01 00:00:00');
INSERT 0 1
=# select i - current_timestamp from abc;
        ?column?
-------------------------
 36 days 12:25:27.699942

If you do that in mysql 5.0 you get a number measuring the number of 1/60ths of a second for the interval.