DSXchange

It there a way to go back in date and time. I have a record thay contains

01-04-2004 01:30:00 and I want to decrease it by 3 hours

The result would be 31-03-2004 10:30:00

Is there a function to do this. I am using ICONV and OCONV but I am wondering if there is an internal value for date and time combined to subtract from.

Could someone please help.

Thanks

Hello Raftsman,

DataStage internally stores the date as an integer and the internal format for time is also an integer (number of seconds since midnight); there is no unified single timestamp format. One needs to program a small routine to take care of date addition and subtraction. It wouldn't be too difficult to make your own format - i.e. seconds since a given date. So you could store numbers easily in floating point by doing a ICONV(<date>,<fmt>)*60*60*24 and then adding ICONV(<time>,'MTS') to it. Reconverting back to a correct date and time is a function MOD with 86400 and so on. I think I've seen a posting here with a good function to do date/time addition and subtraction.

There is no out-of-the-box function.

Search the forum as Arnd suggested; yours is far from a unique problem.