Oracle : how to subtract two dates and get minutes of the result

For those who want to substrat two timestamps (instead of dates), there is a similar solution:

SELECT ( CAST( date2 AS DATE ) - CAST( date1 AS DATE ) ) * 1440 AS minutesInBetween
FROM ...

or

SELECT ( CAST( date2 AS DATE ) - CAST( date1 AS DATE ) ) * 86400 AS secondsInBetween
FROM ...

I think you can adapt the function to substract the two timestamps:

return  EXTRACT(MINUTE FROM 
  TO_TIMESTAMP(to_char(p_date1,'DD-MON-YYYY HH:MI:SS'),'DD-MON-YYYY HH24:MI:SS')
-
  TO_TIMESTAMP(to_char(p_date2,'DD-MON-YYYY HH:MI:SS'),'DD-MON-YYYY HH24:MI:SS')
);

I think you could simplify it by just using CAST(p_date as TIMESTAMP).

return  EXTRACT(MINUTE FROM cast(p_date1 as TIMESTAMP) - cast(p_date2 as TIMESTAMP));

Remember dates and timestamps are big ugly numbers inside Oracle, not what we see in the screen; we don't need to tell him how to read them. Also remember timestamps can have a timezone defined; not in this case.

When you subtract two dates in Oracle, you get the number of days between the two values. So you just have to multiply to get the result in minutes instead:

SELECT (date2 - date1) * 24 * 60 AS minutesBetween
FROM ...