Presto – how is there an alternative to to_char like postgresql?

I need to build a query in presto that could look back the trailing 70 days, the table I am working with is storing the dates in the format of ‘YYYYMMDD’.

in postgresql, I can just simply write the where clause as

where date >= to_char(current_date - 70, 'YYYYMMDD')

and it’ll pull in the date 70 days ago in a YYYYMMDD format.

However, in PrestoSQL, that function doesn’t seem to exist, is there an alternative to this?

Answer

You can do this with date_format():

where date >= date_format(current_date - interval '70' day, '%Y%m%d')

Note that storing dates as strings is not a good practice at all – you should be using the proper date-like datatype – and then you won’t need to do conversions at all.