Determining period between 2 dates

Hi all,

I'm wondering what people think of introducing some kind of function
to extract the number of units between 2 dates? At the moment there's
no way to do this. Take the following example:

Event 1 is '1985-10-26 01:22:00'
Event 2 is now.

How many minutes between these 2 events? What I don't want is how
many years, months, days and hours there are between them.

This could potentially involve implementing age(timestamp, timestamp,
interval), like:

postgres=# SELECT age(current_date, '1985-10-26 01:22:00'::timestamp,
'1 second') as age_in_seconds;
age_in_seconds
----------------
798733367
(1 row)

Is this easily done?

Thanks

--
Thom Brown
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