I watched all these interchange regarding how to compute elased time
as well as truncation with interest.

I understand the need of the posts trying to use only SQL solutions.
But my own past experiences that products migrate from database to
database usually with many different non-SQL 92 standards functions, I
tends to mix SQL and programming languages whenever I generate reports.

Using a programming language to invoke ODBC, JDBC or native CLI
(call-level interface) to select and iterate thru a result set, I then
use programming language such as VB, Delphi, C++ or Java to do the
computation, be it elapsed time calculation, data truncations, mapping
and transformation, and then programmatically spit out the PDF, Excl
or Crystal Report file.

This way, I can take full advantage of SQL-92 conformance as well as
the full power of a programming language to generate a very fancy
reports using open-source libraries that do PDF, Excel, Word, with charts.

So if you have resource to add programming to your reporting, you can
take advantage of the full power of both worlds.

jml