Querying gaps between date ranges in Oracle SQL

Let’s say we have a database table with date ranges, each range designated by a RANGE_START and a RANGE_END column:

CREATE TABLE date_ranges (
  range_start DATE,
  range_end   DATE
);

RANGE_START	RANGE_END
-----------	---------
05/02/2020	01/04/2020
02/04/2020	15/04/2020
16/04/2020	01/05/2020
01/06/2020	20/06/2020
21/06/2020	01/07/2020
02/07/2020	31/07/2020
05/08/2020	30/08/2020

We are now interested in finding the gaps between these date ranges. If we look at this example data set we can see that there are two gaps:

RANGE_START	RANGE_END
05/02/2020	01/04/2020
02/04/2020	15/04/2020
16/04/2020	01/05/2020
-- gap --
01/06/2020	20/06/2020
21/06/2020	01/07/2020
02/07/2020	31/07/2020
-- gap --
05/08/2020	30/08/2020

What would be the SQL query to find these automatically? With standard SQL this would be a difficult task. However, there are some special functions in Oracle SQL called analytic functions that greatly help with this task. Analytic functions compute an aggregate value based on a group of rows. They differ from aggregate functions in that they return multiple rows for each group. In this case we will use the analytic functions MAX and LEAD:

SELECT * FROM (
  SELECT
    MAX(range_end)
      OVER(ORDER BY range_start) + 1 gap_start,
    LEAD(range_start)
      OVER(ORDER BY range_start) - 1 gap_end
  FROM date_ranges
) WHERE gap_start <= gap_end;

The result of this query are the date range gaps we are interested in:

GAP_START	GAP_END
---------	-------
02/05/2020	31/05/2020
01/08/2020	04/08/2020

Note that the MAX function in the query is the analytic MAX function, not the aggregate MAX function, indicated by the OVER keyword with an analytic clause. It operates on a sliding window. The LEAD analytic function allows you to access the following row from the current row without using a self-join.