Difference between 2 dates in SQLite

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How do I get the difference in days between 2 dates in SQLite? I have already tried something like this:

SELECT Date('now') - DateCreated FROM Payment

It returns 0 every time.

12 Answers
 SELECT julianday('now') - julianday(DateCreated) FROM Payment;

The SQLite documentation is a great reference and the DateAndTimeFunctions page is a good one to bookmark.

It's also helpful to remember that it's pretty easy to play with queries with the sqlite command line utility:

sqlite> select julianday(datetime('now'));
2454788.09219907
sqlite> select datetime(julianday(datetime('now')));
2008-11-17 14:13:55

Firstly, it's not clear what your date format is. There already is an answer involving strftime("%s").

I like to expand on that answer.

SQLite has only the following storage classes: NULL, INTEGER, REAL, TEXT or BLOB. To simplify things, I'm going to assume dates are REAL containing the seconds since 1970-01-01. Here's a sample schema for which I will put in the sample data of "1st December 2018":

CREATE TABLE Payment (DateCreated REAL);
INSERT INTO Payment VALUES (strftime("%s", "2018-12-01"));

Now let's work out the date difference between "1st December 2018" and now (as I write this, it is midday 12th December 2018):

Date difference in days:

SELECT (strftime("%s", "now") - DateCreated) / 86400.0 FROM Payment;
-- Output: 11.066875

Date difference in hours:

SELECT (strftime("%s", "now") - DateCreated) / 3600.0 FROM Payment;
-- Output: 265.606388888889

Date difference in minutes:

SELECT (strftime("%s", "now") - DateCreated) / 60.0 FROM Payment;
-- Output: 15936.4833333333

Date difference in seconds:

SELECT (strftime("%s", "now") - DateCreated) FROM Payment;
-- Output: 956195.0

If you want difference in seconds

SELECT strftime('%s', '2019-12-02 12:32:53') - strftime('%s', '2019-12-02 11:32:53')

In my case, I have to calculate the difference in minutes and julianday() does not give an accurate value. Instead, I use strftime():

SELECT (strftime('%s', [UserEnd]) - strftime('%s', [UserStart])) / 60

Both dates are converted to unixtime (seconds), then subtracted to get value in seconds between the two dates. Next, divide it by 60.

https://www.sqlite.org/cvstrac/wiki?p=DateAndTimeFunctions

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