How to select rows where values changed for an ID - sql

Question

I have a table that looks like the following
id effective_date number_of_int_customers
123 10/01/19 0
123 02/01/20 3
456 10/01/19 6
456 02/01/20 6
789 10/01/19 5
789 02/01/20 4
999 10/01/19 0
999 02/01/20 1
I want to write a query that looks at each ID to see if the salespeople have newly started working internationally between October 1st and February 1st.
The result I am looking for is the following:
id effective_date number_of_int_customers
123 02/01/20 3
999 02/01/20 1
The result would return only the salespeople who originally had 0 international customers and now have at least 1.
I have seen similar posts here that use nested queries to pull records where the first date and last have different values. But I only want to pull records where the original value was 0. Is there a way to do this in one query in SQL?

Answer 1

In your case, a simple aggregation would do -- assuming that 0 is the earliest value:
select id, max(number_of_int_customers)
from t
where effective_date in ('2019-10-01', '2020-02-01')
group by id
having min(number_of_int_customers) = 0;
Obviously, this is not correct if the values can decrease to zero. But this having clause fixes that problem:
having min(case when number_of_int_customers = 0 then effective_date end) = min(effective_date)
An alternative is to use window functions, such asfirst_value():
select distinct id, last_noic
from (select t.*,
first_value(number_of_int_customers) over (partition by id order by effective_date) as first_noic,
first_value(number_of_int_customers) over (partition by id order by effective_date desc) as last_noic,
from t
where effective_date in ('2019-10-01', '2020-02-01')
) t
where first_noic = 0;
Hmmm, on second thought, I like lag() better:
select id, number_of_int_customers
from (select t.*,
lag(number_of_int_customers) over (partition by id order by effective_date) as prev_noic
from t
where effective_date in ('2019-10-01', '2020-02-01')
) t
where prev_noic = 0;