Originally posted by stecal
Actually, you can get the seconds to sssss (five s's).

SQL> select to_char(sysdate, 'DD-MON-RR HH:MI:SS.SSSSS') from dual;


TO_CHAR(SYSDATE,'DD-MON-
------------------------
06-JUN-02 01:53:18.49998
'SSSSS' as date format mask simply means seconds elapsed from midnight. It doesn't mean any subseconds, the lowes granule of time with a "clasical" (pre-9i) date type is still one second. You can't get the current time displayed in a subsecond units with Oracle's DATE datatype. No way.

In the above example, 49998 only shows the number of seconds elapsed from midnight on the current day, which is exactly 01:53:18PM.