Category Archives: Uncategorized

For the third in the series and possibly the last I am going to look at the little doosie that was presented to me the other day where the seconds of time passed from a system are presented as an integer and needed converting to a time, when I say a time I mean a time that will add up in MS Excel where the hour part could be over 24, so not strictly a valid DB2 time.

We have a new VOIP phone system here at work and apart from all the times (call start, call end, logged on, logged off) being in the number of seconds from 01/01/1970 (Unix time) so DB2 can handle this very well adding the timestamp of 01/01/1970 with the seconds and you get the correct timestamp of the call. The other interesting thing it does is it records all call times in seconds and this needs converting to hh:mm:ss for reporting purposes. To do this I was reminded by a colleague of the MOD function that DB2 has. MOD returns the remainder as an integer, opposed to the number of times the value will dived.

So you can do something like this to get the hours, minuits and seconds as a VALUES statement where <INTEGER> is the total seconds:

VALUES TRIM(VARCHAR((<INTEGER> / 3600))) || 'h' || TRIM(VARCHAR((MOD(<INTEGER>,3600)) / 60)) || 'm' || TRIM(VARCHAR(MOD(MOD(<INTEGER>,3600 / 60), 60))) || 's'

If you substituted <INTEGER> for 3681 it returns the result:

 1       
 ------- 
 1h1m21s

Which as far as I can work out is correct. There are 3600 seconds in an hour, so to work out hours then you divide seconds by 3600, to get minuits you use MOD to get the remainder of the passed in value and then divide by sixty (the result of MOD will still be in seconds) the result of the division because it is an integer will be returned as an integer so there are some second s remaining. To work out the seconds remaining then you need to MOD the value from the working out the number of minuits to get the seconds.

So then the next step is too produce a function that returns a time:

CREATE FUNCTION GLOBAL.GET_TIME (IN IN_SECONDS INTEGER)
DETERMINISTIC
NO EXTERNAL ACTION
RETURNS VARCHAR(10)
LANGUAGE SQL
BEGIN ATOMIC
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    --Phil C - 14/06/2012
    --Takes in an integer and returns a varchar representation of a time for 
    -- use in excel as opposed to anything beging a valid DB2 time type
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    --Create some vars
    DECLARE OUT_TIME VARCHAR(10);
    DECLARE HOUR_PART INTEGER;
    DECLARE MIN_PART INTEGER;
    DECLARE SEC_PART INTEGER;
    DECLARE HOUR_PART_V VARCHAR(5);
    DECLARE MIN_PART_V VARCHAR(3);
    DECLARE SEC_PART_V VARCHAR(2);

    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    --Set some vars
    SET HOUR_PART = (IN_SECONDS / 3600);
    SET MIN_PART = (MOD(IN_SECONDS,3600) / 60);
    SET SEC_PART = (MOD(MOD(IN_SECONDS,3600 / 60), 60));

    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    --Fattern the values out
    IF (HOUR_PART < 10) THEN
        SET HOUR_PART_V = '0' || TRIM(VARCHAR(HOUR_PART)) || ':';
    ELSE
        SET HOUR_PART_V = TRIM(VARCHAR(HOUR_PART)) || ':';
    END IF;

    IF (MIN_PART < 10) THEN
        SET MIN_PART_V = '0' || TRIM(VARCHAR(MIN_PART)) || ':';
    ELSE
        SET MIN_PART_V = TRIM(VARCHAR(MIN_PART)) || ':';
    END IF;

    IF (SEC_PART < 10) THEN
        SET SEC_PART_V = '0' || TRIM(VARCHAR(SEC_PART));
    ELSE
        SET SEC_PART_V = TRIM(VARCHAR(SEC_PART));
    END IF;

    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    --Create the end value
    SET OUT_TIME = (HOUR_PART_V || MIN_PART_V || SEC_PART_V);

    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    --Return the value
    RETURN OUT_TIME;

END

So this will return a time like result up to 9999:59:59 and you will be able to export a result set to Excel or the like and then it can be added up. DB2 will not accept this as a time! So when you run this:

VALUES GLOBAL.GET_TIME(3681)

Returns

 1        
 -------- 
 01:01:21

Which is the same result as at the start so I think the function is a good one. Till next time happy UDF’ing