Calculating Time Difference Between Timestamps in Days through MySQL

Getting the time difference between two timestamps is often necessary for data analysis and application logic. In MySQL, one common question is how to determine the difference in days between two timestamps.

By default, subtraction between two timestamps in MySQL results in a value expressed in seconds. This may not be useful when you need the difference in days. To derive the time difference in days, we can leverage the DATEDIFF() function.

Using the DATEDIFF() Function

DATEDIFF() takes two date or timestamp values as inputs and returns the difference between them in days, ignoring the time component. The syntax is:

DATEDIFF(date2, date1)

Example

Let's assume we have a table with two timestamp columns, event_start and event_end. To calculate the number of days between 2023-03-08 12:34:56 and 2023-03-15 18:09:12, we would use the following query:

SELECT DATEDIFF('2023-03-15 18:09:12', '2023-03-08 12:34:56') AS days_difference;

The result would be:

 --------------- 
| days_difference |
 --------------- 
| 7              |
 --------------- 

Conclusion

By utilizing the DATEDIFF() function, we can easily calculate the difference between two timestamps in days in MySQL. This is particularly valuable when working with temporal data and extracting insights based on time intervals.