oracle finding day of week

[BeefStu]

Is there a function I can use that can find 5 Saturdays ago from the
current date or find 8 Sundays from the current date?

What I want to do is pass do something like this:

select dow(sysdate, -7(saturday) from dual

dow = Day of week

Thanks to all who answer.

[Flyby]

In most solutions they construct a permanent time/date table to handle such problems (Like holidays,working days,day of week,weeknumber,...) with dates from the past to the far future.
Finding the x-day of type z could be done by ranking futures on the date/time dimension.

[BeefStu]

Thanks for the response but I find it hard to believe Oracle does not
provide that functionalityor some derviation of it.

Ie

SQL> select sysdate from dual;

SYSDATE
---------
14-MAR-11

SQL> select NEXT_DAY ('01-MAR-11', 'MON') from dual;

NEXT_DAY(
---------
07-MAR-11

There has to be some way of doing this? Maybe subtracting 5 weeks from
the current date and than finding the next occurance of that day?

Any examples or input would be greatly appreciated.

[PAVB]

Try this for seven Sundays in advance counting from next Sunday.

select NEXT_DAY((sysdate + 49), 'SUN') from dual;

[gandolf989]

You can also do this:

SYS@rman AS SYSDBA> select to_char(this_date, 'day') day, this_date 
from ( select trunc(sysdate, 'd')-36 this_date from dual);

DAY          THIS_DATE
------------ ---------------
saturday     05-FEB-11

Elapsed: 00:00:00.10
SYS@rman AS SYSDBA> select to_char(this_date, 'day') day, this_date 
from ( select trunc(sysdate, 'd')+41 this_date from dual);

DAY          THIS_DATE
------------ ---------------
saturday     23-APR-11

Elapsed: 00:00:00.05

[BeefStu]

Perfect!! This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks