Grrrr… nothing like a MySql bug to really make your day.

I had need to generate a sum for a column of duration values with the type of TIME.  Orginally I used this as part of my query:

sum(call_duration) as totalhours

Turns out this does not work properly and has apparently been a problem since 2005!

http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=12108

From reading the comments, there appears to be some argument as to the validity of the bug.  For what it’s worth, I found that the problem is more pronounced with more results.  I found that it was non-existant (that is that the sum returned the correct value) with result sets with only a few rows.   The problem seemed to get more severe based on more rows in the results.  In my case, a result set with about 2000 rows in it had an error of on the order of three hours.

The work around is to modify the query slightly:

sum(TIME_TO_SEC(crf_call_duration)) as totalhours

This converts the time to essentially an integer which is then properly handled by the sum.  You can then either work with the result as a count of seconds, or use the function SEC_TO_TIME to convert it back to a TIME value.

I hope this helps someone else.  It cost me a number of hours…