Convert Raw/Hex to Timestamp

Just filing this away on my own blog because it seems that I always have hard finding it via google.  Here’s some code to convert raw/hex values into timestamps.  (I’ve come across this need in two situations: [1] bind variables recorded in trace files or sql monitor and [2] hi/low values in column statistics.)

As a query, without creating any objects in the database:

-- this SQL will honor your nls_timestamp_format settings
undef raw_timestamp
select to_timestamp(
        to_char( to_number( substr( p_str, 1, 2 ), 'xx' ) - 100, 'fm00' ) ||
        to_char( to_number( substr( p_str, 3, 2 ), 'xx' ) - 100, 'fm00' ) ||
        to_char( to_number( substr( p_str, 5, 2 ), 'xx' ), 'fm00' ) ||
        to_char( to_number( substr( p_str, 7, 2 ), 'xx' ), 'fm00' ) ||
        to_char( to_number( substr( p_str,9, 2 ), 'xx' )-1, 'fm00' ) ||
        to_char( to_number( substr( p_str,11, 2 ), 'xx' )-1, 'fm00' ) ||
        to_char( to_number( substr( p_str,13, 2 ), 'xx' )-1, 'fm00' ), 'yyyymmddhh24miss' )
from (select '&raw_timestamp' p_str from dual);

References:

• As a function, from Tom Kyte in 2007 – for some reason Tom’s query had different offsets for the time components of the hex string (10,12,14 instead of 9,11,13) and his query does not work correctly for me on 11.2.0.3
• Directly query table statistics, from Martin Widlake in 2010