In DuckDB, the date_diff() (along with its synonym datediff()) and date_sub() (along with its synonym datesub()) functions allow us to get the difference between two dates. While they might seem similar, they actually calculate date differences in distinct ways that are important to understand for accurate data analysis.
Let’s take a look at the difference between these functions.
DuckDB provides us with a couple of ways to get the weekday name from a date or timestamp value. This could be the full day name, such as Monday, or the short/abbreviated day name, such as Mon.
Here are two ways to return the day name from a date in DuckDB.
DuckDB has emerged as a powerful analytical database system designed for fast in-memory data processing. One common analytical task involves calculating time differences between events—whether measuring intervals between transactions, tracking service response times, or analyzing temporal patterns in time series data.
This article provides an exploration of calculating time differences in DuckDB, covering both basic and slightly more advanced techniques.
DuckDB provides us with a couple of easy ways to perform additions and subtractions on dates. In particular, we can use the - operator to do the job, or the date_add() operator combined with the - operator.
Here are two options for subtracting days from a date in DuckDB.
DuckDB provides us with a good selection of functions for working with date and timestamp values. One such function is the LAST_DAY() function, which returns the last day of the month of the given date.
The way it works is, we pass a date to the function, and it returns the date of the last day of that month.
In DuckDB, we can use the ISINF() function to check whether a value is finite. DuckDB supports infinite values, and so this function allows us to check for that. This can be useful when working with floating-point data that might contain special values like NaN (Not a Number) or infinity. The function also works on date and timestamp values, as they can be infinite too.
DuckDB provides us with a good selection of functions for working with dates and timestamps. One of the things we might find ourselves needing to do is extracting the ISO weekday from a date or timestamp—a numeric value where Monday is represented as 1 and Sunday as 7.
This article presents four functions we can use to get the ISO weekday from a date in DuckDB.
In DuckDB, the strptime() function converts a date/time string into a valid timestamp value. We pass a format string to the function in order to tell it what format our string uses. This can be handy if we ever need to construct timestamps based on date/time strings that may or may not be in a valid format.
But what if we have multiple date/time strings in different formats?
Fortunately, the strptime() function caters for this scenario too.
DuckDB has a today() function that returns the current date. It’s similar to the current_date function, which does the same thing.
Here, we’ll look at how the today() function works, along with some basic examples.
When working with SQL databases, one operation we often find ourselves performing is date/time arithmetic, such as adding or subtracting an interval to/from a date/time value. Fortunately, most RDBMSs make such operations quite easy to achieve, and DuckDB is no exception.
Below are two methods we can use in order to subtract hours from a date, timestamp, or time value in DuckDB.