I need to add 30 minutes to values in a Oracle date column. I do this in my SELECT statement by specifying
to_char(date_and_time + (.000694 * 31)
which works fine most of the time. But not when the time is on the AM/PM border. For example, adding 30 minutes to 12:30 [which is PM] returns 1:00 which is AM. The answer I expect is 13:00. What's the correct way to do this?
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.