Tag: date ranges

Contiguous date ranges in Oracle SQL

In one of my last posts from a couple of weeks ago I wrote about querying gaps between non-contiguous date ranges in Oracle SQL. This week’s post is about contiguous date ranges.

While non-contiguous date ranges are best represented in a database table with a start_date and an end_date column, it is better to represent contiguous date ranges only by one date column, so that we avoid redundancy and do not have to keep the start date of a date range in sync with the end date of the previous date range. In this post I will use the start date:

CREATE TABLE date_ranges (
name VARCHAR2(100),
start_date DATE
);

The example content of the table is:

NAME	START_DATE
----	----------
A	05/02/2020
B	02/04/2020
C	16/04/2020
D	01/06/2020
E	21/06/2020
F	02/07/2020
G	05/08/2020

This representation means that the date range with the most recent start date does not have an end. The application using this data model can choose whether to interpret this as a date range with an open end or just as the end point for the previous range and not as a date range by itself.

While this is a nice non-redundant representation, it is less convenient for queries where we want to have both a start and an end date per row, for example in order to check wether a given date lies within a date range or not. Luckily, we can transform the ranges with a query:

SELECT
date_ranges.*,
LEAD(date_ranges.start_date)
OVER (ORDER BY start_date)
AS end_date
FROM date_ranges;

As in the previous post on non-contiguous date ranges the LEAD analytic function allows you to access the following row from the current row without using a self-join. Here’s the result:

NAME	START_DATE	END_DATE
----	----------	--------
A	05/02/2020	02/04/2020
B	02/04/2020	16/04/2020
C	16/04/2020	01/06/2020
D	01/06/2020	21/06/2020
E	21/06/2020	02/07/2020
F	02/07/2020	05/08/2020
G	05/08/2020	(null)

By using a WITH clause you can use this query like a view and join it with the another table, for example with the join condition that a date lies within a date range:

WITH ranges AS
(SELECT date_ranges.*, LEAD(date_ranges.start_date) OVER (ORDER BY start_date) AS end_date FROM date_ranges)
SELECT timeseries.*, ranges.name
FROM timeseries LEFT OUTER JOIN ranges ON
timeseries.measurement_date
BETWEEN ranges.start_date AND ranges.end_date;

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.