Access Query: get difference of dates with a twist - sql

Question

I'm going to do my best to explain this so I apologize in advance if my explanation is a little awkward. If I am foggy somewhere, please tell me what would help you out.
I have a table filled with circuits and dates. Each circuit gets trimmed on a time cycle of about 36 months or 48 months. I have a column that gives me this info. I have one record for every time the a circuit's trim cycle has been completed. I am attempting to link a known circuit outage list, to a table with their outage data, to a table with the circuit's trim history. The twist is the following:
I only want to get back circuits that have exceeded their trim cycles by 6 months. So I would need to take all records for a circuit, look at each individual record, find the most recent previous record relative to the record currently being examined (I will need every record examined invididually), calculate the difference between the two records in months, then return only the records that exceeded 6 months of difference between any two entries for a given feeder.
Here is an example of the data:
+----+--------+----------+-------+
| ID | feeder | comp | cycle |
| 1 | 123456 | 1/1/2001 | 36 |
| 2 | 123456 | 1/1/2004 | 36 |
| 3 | 123456 | 7/1/2007 | 36 |
| 4 | 123456 | 3/1/2011 | 36 |
| 5 | 123456 | 1/1/2014 | 36 |
+----+--------+----------+-------+
Here is an example of the result set I would want (please note: cycle can vary by circuit, so the value in the cycle column needs to be in the calculation to determine if I exceeded the cycle by 6 months between trimmings):
+----+--------+----------+-------+
| ID | feeder | comp | cycle |
| 3 | 123456 | 7/1/2007 | 36 |
| 4 | 123456 | 3/1/2011 | 36 |
+----+--------+----------+-------+
This is the query I started but I'm failing really hard at determining how to make the date calculations correctly:
SELECT temp_feederList.Feeder, Temp_outagesInfo.causeType, Temp_outagesInfo.StormNameThunder, Temp_outagesInfo.deviceGroup, Temp_outagesInfo.beginTime, tbl_Trim_History.COMP, tbl_Trim_History.CYCLE
FROM (temp_feederList
LEFT JOIN Temp_outagesInfo ON temp_feederList.Feeder = Temp_outagesInfo.Feeder)
LEFT JOIN tbl_Trim_History ON Temp_outagesInfo.Feeder = tbl_Trim_History.CIRCUIT_ID;
I wasn't really able to figure out where I need to go from here to get that most recent entry and perform the mathematical comparison. I've never been asked to do SQL this complex before, so I want to thank all of you for your patience and any assistance you're willing to lend.

Answer 1

I'm making some assumptions, but this uses a subquery to give you rows in the feeder list where the previous completed date was greater than the number of months ago indicated by the cycle:
SELECT tbl_Trim_History.ID, tbl_Trim_History.feeder,
tbl_Trim_History.comp, tbl_Trim_History.cycle
FROM tbl_Trim_History
WHERE tbl_Trim_History.comp>
(SELECT Max(DateAdd("m", tbl_Trim_History.cycle, comp))
FROM tbl_Trim_History T2
WHERE T2.feeder = tbl_Trim_History.feeder AND
T2.comp < tbl_Trim_History.comp)
If you needed to check for longer than 36 months you could add an arbitrary value to the months calculated by the DateAdd function.
Also I don't know if the value of cycle specified the number of month from the prior cycle or the number of months to the next one. If the latter I would change tbl_Trim_History.cycle in the DateAdd function to just cycle.

Answer 2

SELECT tbl_trim_history.ID, tbl_trim_history.Feeder,
tbl_trim_history.Comp, tbl_trim_history.Cycle,
(select max(comp) from tbl_trim_history T
where T.feeder=tbl_trim_history.feeder and
t.comp<tbl_trim_history.comp) AS PriorComp,
IIf(DateDiff("m",[priorcomp],[comp])>36,"x") AS [Select]
FROM tbl_trim_history;
This query identifies (with an X in the last column) the records from tbl_trim_history that exceed the cycle time - but as noted in the comments I'm not entirely sure if this is what you need or not, or how to incorporate the other 2 tables. Once you see what it is doing you can modify it to only keep the records you need.