Excluding events within date-range while joining tables in SSMS - ssms

Question

SQL newbie here. Using Microsoft SQL management studio. Having trouble excluding records that are outside of a particular date range while joining two tables. Please Help!
I have two tables - Event and DateRange.
Event
CustomerID ---------------- EventDate
1 ------------------------- 1/2/14
1 -------------------------- 2/5/15
1 -------------------------- 6/1/13
DateRange
CustomerID ---------------- StartDate ----------- EndDate
1 -------------------------- 1/1/14 -------------- 1/3/14
1 -------------------------- 2/1/15 -------------- 2/3/15
1 -------------------------- 5/30/13 ------------- 6/2/13
I want to join those two tables using CustomerID but I only want to ouput the date that was outside of the Startdate and EndDate date range (row 2 in Event table - 2/5/15).
I tried the following query but what keeps happening is that it kept giving me all the dates back in multiple because for each event date there were two StartDate and EndDate where it didn't fit into.
SQL Query
SELECT
E.CustomerID
,E.EventDate
,D.StartDate
,D.EndDate
FROM
Event AS E
INNER JOIN DateRange AS D
ON E.CustomerID = D.CustomerID
WHERE
(E.EventDate NOT BETWEEN D.StartDate and D.EndDate)
ORDER BY E.CustomerID
The output I got was something like this...
CustomerID ----- EventDate ----- StartDate ----- EndDate
1 -------------- 1/2/14 -------- 2/1/15 -------- 2/3/15
1 -------------- 1/2/14 -------- 5/30/13-------- 6/2/15
1 -------------- 2/5/15 -------- 1/1/14 -------- 1/3/14
1 -------------- 2/5/15 -------- 5/30/13 ------- 6/2/13
1 -------------- 6/1/13 -------- 1/1/14 -------- 1/3/14
1 -------------- 6/1/13 -------- 2/1/15 -------- 2/3/15
It's kind of doing a cross join because all the customerIDs are the same. And I need to keep the customerID because that's the only way to join those two tables. So how can I join these two table to only get the output that I want. Even if I do SELECT DISTINCT just the E.EventDate column by itself it'll still give me all three EventDates.
I pretty much need a count of how many event dates there are that don't fall into the startdate and enddate.
Thanks.

Answer 1

The problem is that you don't have a unique ID on your Event table to exclude your result set from. Since you're joining by CustomerID, it's giving you every row that doesn't meet your criteria. You might want to try something like this.
CREATE TABLE Event (ID INT NOT NULL IDENTITY PRIMARY KEY, CustomerID INT, EventDate DATETIME)
SELECT DISTINCT
E.EventDate
,E.CustomerID
FROM
Event AS E
INNER JOIN DateRange AS D
ON E.CustomerID = D.CustomerID
WHERE
E.ID NOT IN (
SELECT E.ID FROM Event AS E
INNER JOIN DateRange AS D
ON E.CustomerID = D.CustomerID
WHERE E.EventDate BETWEEN D.StartDate and D.EndDate
)
ORDER BY E.CustomerID
As you can see from above, I've created an Identity ID for the Event table. Now you can use a sub query to exclude the "events" from the result set that have dates that fall within a date range in the DateRange table. Which will give you what you're looking for. Hope that helps.
EventDate ------------- CustomerID
2015-02-05 00:00:00.000 1