to each field if any field is negative.
</para>
- <para>
- Internally <type>interval</> values are stored as months, days,
- and seconds. This is done because the number of days in a month
- varies, and a day can have 23 or 25 hours if a daylight savings
- time adjustment is involved. The months and days fields are integers
- while the seconds field can store fractions. Because intervals are
- usually created from constant strings or <type>timestamp</> subtraction,
- this storage method works well in most cases. Functions
- <function>justify_days</> and <function>justify_hours</> are
- available for adjusting days and hours that overflow their normal
- ranges.
- </para>
-
<para>
In the verbose input format, and in some fields of the more compact
input formats, field values can have fractional parts; for example
</tgroup>
</table>
+ <para>
+ Internally <type>interval</type> values are stored as months, days,
+ and seconds. This is done because the number of days in a month
+ varies, and a day can have 23 or 25 hours if a daylight savings
+ time adjustment is involved. The months and days fields are integers
+ while the seconds field can store fractions. Because intervals are
+ usually created from constant strings or <type>timestamp</type> subtraction,
+ this storage method works well in most cases, but can cause unexpected
+ results:
+
+<programlisting>
+SELECT EXTRACT(hours from '80 minutes'::interval);
+ date_part
+-----------
+ 1
+
+SELECT EXTRACT(days from '80 hours'::interval);
+ date_part
+-----------
+ 0
+</programlisting>
+
+ Functions <function>justify_days</function> and
+ <function>justify_hours</function> are available for adjusting days
+ and hours that overflow their normal ranges.
+ </para>
+
</sect2>
<sect2 id="datatype-interval-output">