Postgres age function #postgresql

If you want to select records according to a specific interval, like Rails' ActiveSupport 1.year.ago PostgreSQL has you covered.

The age function returns an interval type and can be used in queries like so:

select * from sometbl where age(created_at) > '1 year';

By default the age function will use the current system time to calculate the age. If you want to calculate the age relative to a different time you can simply pass in another argument:

psql> select age(timestamp '2016-08-28', timestamp '1957-06-13');
           age
-------------------------
 59 years 2 mons 15 days
(1 row)

You can also use the make_interval function to create intervals using numeric parameters:

psql> select make_interval(1,2,3,4,5);
         make_interval
--------------------------------
 1 year 2 mons 25 days 05:00:00
 (1 row)

In a query it can be used like so:

select * from sometbl where age(created_at) > make_interval(1);

to select rows with created_at older than one year from now.

Read more about the age function and other cool date/time manipulations see the official documentation.

h/t Jack Christensen