ORA-01873

Well, I came across some curious issue with Oracle where in I had to increment a timestamp by a certain number of days.  At first, I thought it would be as simple as something like:

SQL> select systimestamp + 2 from dual;

I quickly realized though that the result of this would effectively drop the time component.  Makes sense though as Oracle implicitly converts values so perhaps it was being converted into date (without the time data) before the addition operation.

After some research, I found that preserving dates means using interval in this fashion:

SQL> select systimestamp + interval '2' day from dual;

Well, while this seems to work, the timestamp column I have on my table doesn't work.  Instead, I get this error!

ERROR at line 1:

ORA-01873: the leading precision of the interval is too small

Good grief.  After mucking around with Oracle and reading some stuff up, I came across a rather helpful article by Philip Greenspun.  What I ended up doing was roughly like this:

SQL> select some_timestamp + interval '2' day(3) from (...)

Damn Oracle and their implicit datatype conversions!