Displaying Elapsed Time: The difference between two dates

If you ever need to display the number of hours, minutes and seconds between two events, this will help. This little package can be called once to record the start time, then later to display the elapsed time since the initial call. It has two modes of displaying the time, depending on whether the elapsed time is more or less than 10 seconds. When it is less than ten seconds, it displays the seconds down to 0.01 second. This process even corrects for some truncation errors caused by the floating point arithmetic used to extract hours, minutes and seconds.

The output looks like one of these:

Elapsed time = 9.25 seconds
Elapsed time (HH:MI:SS) = 00:02:15
Call Elapsed_Time as follows:

PK2.ELAPSED_TIME(T,'start'); -- to initialize
PK2.ELAPSED_TIME(T); -- to retrieve the formatted text.
Here is the package:

CREATE OR REPLACE PACKAGE PK2 IS
PROCEDURE ELAPSED_TIME
(T IN OUT VARCHAR2,MODE1 IN VARCHAR2 DEFAULT NULL);
END PK2;
.
/
SHOW ERRORS PACKAGE PK2
CREATE OR REPLACE PACKAGE BODY PK2 IS

--------------------------------------
START_TIME DATE;
START_TIMEN NUMBER;
--
PROCEDURE ELAPSED_TIME

---------------------------------

(T IN OUT VARCHAR2,MODE1 IN VARCHAR2 DEFAULT NULL) IS
ET NUMBER; -- Elapsed run time
ETN NUMBER; -- Elapsed time to hundredths of seconds
BEGIN
IF MODE1 IS NOT NULL THEN
START_TIME := SYSDATE;
START_TIMEN := DBMS_UTILITY.GET_TIME;
ELSE
ET := SYSDATE - START_TIME + 0.000001;
ETN := (DBMS_UTILITY.GET_TIME - START_TIMEN) / 100;
IF ETN >= 10 THEN
T:='Elapsed time (HH:MM:SS) = '
||Ltrim(To_char( Trunc(ET*24), '99900'))||':'
||Ltrim(To_char(Mod(Trunc(ET*1440),60), '00')) ||':'
||Ltrim(To_char(Mod(Trunc(ET*86400),60) ,'00'));
ELSE
T:='Elapsed time ='
||To_char(ETN,'0.00')||' seconds';
END IF;
END IF;
END ELAPSED_TIME;
--
END PK2; -- End of Package Body --
.
/
SHOW ERRORS PACKAGE BODY PK2

Here is a script to test the process:

Set SERVEROUTPUT ON SIZE 20000
Declare
T Varchar2(40);
X Date;
Begin
PK2.ELAPSED_TIME(T,'start');
For I in 1..100 loop
X := Sysdate; -- Spend some time looping
End loop;
PK2.ELAPSED_TIME(T);
DBMS_Output.Put_Line(T);
End;
.
/