One addition to what I posted earlier (shown below). The derived_sysdate in the query is 1969-12-31 19:59:59, i.e. 8pm instead of 23:59:59 of that night (or 12am of 1970-01-01). The 4 hour difference may be due to different timezones. According to http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converted.html?iso700101T00&p1=0&p29&p3#&p4(3&p5(6 8pm of 1969-12-31 at UTC epoch is the time for the timezone where Nova Scotia, Canada is. I'm not sure why. Yong Huang My previous message: You just need to change your sysdate to 2013-08-23 15:24:25.823. For example: SQL> with x as (select 1377285865823053 as t, (1377285865823053/1e6) as t1 from dual) 2 select t tim_micro, t1 tim_sec, '2013-08-23 15:24:25' curr_sysdate, to_date('2013-08-23 15:24:25','yyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss')-(t1/86400) 3 derived_sysdate 4 from x; TIM_MICRO TIM_SEC CURR_SYSDATE DERIVED_SYSDATE -------------------- -------------------- ------------------- ------------------- 1377285865823053 1377285865.823053 2013-08-23 15:24:25 1969-12-31 19:59:59 The derived sysdate is the epoch. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l