Folks, Before I go off re-inventing the wheel, and yes I still have to scan AskTom, but here's by "problem". I've a developer who has calculated the elapsed time of some database action, whatever it is, and he wants to display the result to the user, but not as a pile of seconds. He wants to convert it into hours, minutes, and seconds so that the display comes out as a character string looking like "x hours y minutes z seconds". Anyone done that before. Dick Goulet Senior Oracle DBA Oracle Certified DBA -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l