Comments on: UNIX timestamp to Oracle Date Conversion

By: Hedgehog

Hedgehog — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 21:23:53 +0000

What to do if my timestamps are bigger that 32-bit format e.g. 1026259200000 for date 2002-07-10 (yyyy-MM-dd)? If I cut last free 0 I’m getting correct date. But how can be sure when to cut them and when not?

By: Jon

Jon — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 14:47:29 +0000

Yup, Mike’s query does the same thing my function does, just without error handling. Nice for a one-off but if you need this often it’s handy to have the function around.

Jon

By: mike

mike — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 16:45:12 +0000

This query converts UNIX to Oracle and handles the time zones. Add TO_CHAR to format the date, if required.

select trunc((timestamp ‘1970-01-01 00:00:00 GMT’ + numtodsinterval(1094165422, ‘SECOND’)) at time zone ‘Canada/Pacific’) at_time_zone_date
from dual

By: Anthony Ettinger

Anthony Ettinger — Tue, 23 May 2006 21:07:51 +0000

you saved my day…i was ready to bang my head against the screeen.

#version 8.1.7x

oracle_date := unix_epoch + (unixts/86400);

By: Life After Coffee » UNIX Time and UNIX Timestamps

Life After Coffee » UNIX Time and UNIX Timestamps — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 01:23:06 +0000

[...] A recent comment on my story about converting UNIX timestamps to Oracle dates prompted me to do a little extra digging on UNIX time. [...]

By: Jon

Jon — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 13:47:54 +0000

Srivalli,

I believe the discrepency you are seing is because the UNIX timestamp is reported in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). UTC is equivalent to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). To evaluate the date in your local timezone you will need to convert it with the Oracle delivered new_time function as below:

select to_char(new_time(unixts_to_date(1145366808), ‘GMT’, ‘EDT’), ‘MM/DD/YYYY HH24:MI:SS’) from dual

If you grab a UNIX timestamp from a converter on a website be careful, some of them are converting for their own timezone already. This one allows you to enter an offset from GMT for accurate timestamps:

http://www.4webhelp.net/us/timestamp.php

Hope this helps. Perhaps I’ll rewrite this function to compensate for the timezone as well.

Jon

By: srivalli

srivalli — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 04:33:02 +0000

I thought it will solve the problem , but its not.
I implemented the same procedure what ever is given above for converting from timestamp to date and time . It is giveing the correct date but not the time , as my sytem is showing it differently

By: Jon

Jon — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 12:03:40 +0000

That’s a nice and succinct method Johannes. The one above does essentially the same thing with a couple variables and a couple more steps, but also provides some exception handling.

By: Johannes Buchner

Johannes Buchner — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 10:35:16 +0000

This page:
http://www.internetvibes.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=2872

does the same using
select TO_DATE(’1970-01-01′, ‘YYYY-MM-DD’) + numtodsinterval(unixtimestamp, ‘SECOND’) from dual

Ain’t this much easier and enough though?

By: Jon

Jon — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 16:22:59 +0000

It seems the NUMTODSINTERVAL function is new in Oracle 9i. If you are working with Oracle 8i or earlier you can substitute this line:

oracle_date := unix_epoch + (unixts/86400);

instead of the NUMTODSINTERVAL to eliminate this error.

The NUMTODSINTERVAL function turns the number of seconds into a fractional number representing days. Dividing the seconds by 86400 (the number of seconds in 1 day) achieves the same thing.