Oracle: how to add minutes to a timestamp?

In addition to being able to add a number of days to a date, you can use interval data types assuming you are on Oracle 9i or later, which can be somewhat easier to read,

SQL> edWrote file afiedt.bufSELECT sysdate, sysdate + interval '30' minute FROM dualSQL> /SYSDATE              SYSDATE+INTERVAL'30'-------------------- --------------------02-NOV-2008 16:21:40 02-NOV-2008 16:51:40

All of the other answers are basically right but I don't think anyone's directly answered your original question.

Assuming that "date_and_time" in your example is a column with type DATE or TIMESTAMP, I think you just need to change this:

to_char(date_and_time + (.000694 * 31))

to this:

to_char(date_and_time + (.000694 * 31), 'DD-MON-YYYY HH24:MI')

It sounds like your default date format uses the "HH" code for the hour, not "HH24".

Also, I think your constant term is both confusing and imprecise. I guess what you did is calculate that (.000694) is about the value of a minute, and you are multiplying it by the number of minutes you want to add (31 in the example, although you said 30 in the text).

I would also start with a day and divide it into the units you want within your code. In this case, (1/48) would be 30 minutes; or if you wanted to break it up for clarity, you could write ( (1/24) * (1/2) ).

This would avoid rounding errors (except for those inherent in floating point which should be meaningless here) and is clearer, at least to me.

UPDATE "TABLE" SET DATE_FIELD = CURRENT_TIMESTAMP + interval '48' minute WHERE (...)

Where interval is one of

• YEAR
• MONTH
• DAY
• HOUR
• MINUTE
• SECOND