INTERVAL data type
Informix®
Informix provides the INTERVAL
data type to store a value that represents a
span of time.
INTERVAL
types are divided into two classes:- year-month intervals. For example:
INTERVAL YEAR(5) TO MONTH
- day-time intervals. For example:
INTERVAL DAY(9) TO SECOND
INTERVAL
columns can be defined with various time units, by specifying a
start and end qualifier. For example, you can define an interval to store a number of hours and
minutes with INTERVAL HOUR(n) TO MINUTE
, where
n defines the maximum number of digits for the hours unit.The values of Informix
INTERVAL
can be represented with a
character string literal, or as INTERVAL()
literals:'-9834 15:45:12.345' -- an INTERVAL DAY(6) TO FRACTION(3)
'7623-11' -- an INTERVAL YEAR(9) TO MONTH
INTERVAL(18734:45) HOUR(5) TO MINUTE
INTERVAL(-7634-11) YEAR(5) TO MONTH
Microsoft™ SQL Server
Microsoft SQL Server does not provide a
data type corresponding the Informix
INTERVAL
data type.
Solution
The INTERVAL
data type and values are converted CHAR(50)
column
with IBM® DB2®.
INTERVAL
values can be stored and retrieved from the database. However, since
IBM DB2 does not support
a native interval type, arithmetics cannot be performed on the database side in SQL statements.
The
INTERVAL
types translation can be controlled with the following FGLPROFILE
entry:dbi.database.dsname.ifxemul.datatype.interval = { true | false }
For more details see IBM Informix emulation parameters in FGLPROFILE.