How to calculate difference between two rows in a date interval? - sql

Question

I'm trying to compare data from an Access 2010 database based on a date interval. Example I have items from various purchase orders and I want to maintain the history of these item's delivery to a warehouse. So my purchase order has a request for a quantity of 10 of a material, for example, and it can be partially delivered in many deliveries and I want to know how this delivery varied in a date interval. To fill the date field the criteria used is the following: if the item had an update in the QtyPending field, I copy the current row deactivating it with a booelan field, create a new entry with the current update date updating the QtyPending field, so the active record is the actual state of the item. So I have a table that holds informations about these items like that
PO POItem QtyPending Date Active
4500000123 10 10 01/09/2014 FALSE
4500000123 10 8 05/09/2014 TRUE
4500000122 30 5 03/09/2014 FALSE
4500000122 30 1 04/09/2014 TRUE
With this example, for the first item, it means that from date 01/09 to 04/09 the QtyPending field didn't suffer a variation, meaning that the supplier didn't make any delivery to me, but from 01/09 to 05/08 he delivered me a qty of 2 of a material. For the second one, from date 03/09 to 04/09 the supplier delivered me a qty of 4 of a material. So, if I were to be making a report query from 02/09/2014 to 04/09/2014, the expected output is like this:
PO POItem QtyDelivered
4500000123 10 0
4500000122 30 4
And a report from 31/08/2014 to 10/09/2014, would have this output
PO POItem QtyDelivered
4500000123 10 2
4500000122 30 4
I'm not coming up with a query to make this report. Can anyone help me?

Answer 1

There are many ways of solving this. The easiest one would be to simply make a query of all the necessary records between two dates, loop over them and insert into a temporary table the result. This temporary table can then be the source of your report. A lot of people will scream at you for not using a big query instead but getting the result that you want in the fastest and simplest way should be your priority.
Your problem with your schema is that you don't have the QtyDelivered stored for each record. If you would have it, it would be an easy thing to sum over it in order to get needed result. By not storing this value, you have transformed a simple and fast query into a much harder and slower one because you need to recalculate this value in some way or other and you must do this without forgetting the fact that it's possible to have more than two records.
For calculating this value, you can either use a sub-query to retrieve the value from the previous row or a Left join do to the same. Once you have this value, you can subtract these two to get the needed difference; allowing for the possibility of Null value if there is no previous row. Once you have these values, you can now sum over them to get the final result with a Group By. Notice that in order to perform these calculations, you need to have one or two more levels of subquery. The first query should be something like:
Select PO, POItem, QtyPending, (Select Top 1 QtyPending from MyTable T2 where T1.PO = T2.PO and T2.Date < T1.Date And (T2.Date between #Date1 and #Date2) Order by T2.Date Desc) as QtyPending2 from MyTable T1 Where T1.Date between #Date1 and #Date2) ...
With this as either another subquery or as a View, you can then compute the desired difference by comparing the values of QtyPending and QtyPending2; without forgetting that QtyPendin2 may be Null. The remaining steps are easy to do.
Notice that the above example is for SQL-Server, you might have to change it a little for Access. In any case, you can find here many examples on how to compare two rows under Access. As noted earlier, you can also use a Left Join instead of a subquery to compare your rows.

Answer 2

I came up with this query that solved the problem, it wasn't that simple
SELECT
ItmDtIni.PO
,ItmDtIni.POItem AS [PO Item]
,ROUND(ItmDtIni.QtyPending - ItmDtEnd.QtyPending, 3) AS [Qty Delivered]
,ROUND((ItmDtIni.QtyPending - ItmDtEnd.QtyPending) * ItmDtEnd.Price, 2) AS [Value delivered(US$)]
//Filtering subqueries to bring only the items in the date interval to make a self join
FROM (((SELECT
PO
,POItem
,QtyPending
,MIN(Date) AS MinDate
FROM Item
WHERE Date BETWEEN FORMAT(begin_date, 'dd/mm/yyyy') AND FORMAT(end_date, 'dd/mm/yyyy')
GROUP BY
PO
,POItem
,QtyPending) AS ItmDtIni
//Self join filtering to bring only items in the date interval with the previously filtered table
INNER JOIN (SELECT
PO
,POItem
,QtyPending
,Price
,MAX(Date) AS MaxDate
FROM Item
WHERE Date BETWEEN FORMAT(begin_date, 'dd/mm/yyyy') AND FORMAT(end_date, 'dd/mm/yyyy')
GROUP BY
PO
,POItem
,QtyPending
,Price) AS ItmDtEnd
ON ItmDtIni.PO = ItmDtEnd.PO
AND ItmDtIni.POItem = ItmDtEnd.POItem)
INNER JOIN PO
ON ItmDtEnd.PO = PO.Numero)
WHERE
//Showing only items that had a variation in the date interval
ROUND(ItmDtIni.QtyPending - ItmDtEnd.QtyPending, 3) <> 0
//Anchoring min date in the interval for each item found by the first subquery
AND ItmDtIni.MinDate = (SELECT MIN(Item.Date)
FROM Item
WHERE
ItmDtIni.PO = Item.PO
AND ItmDtIni.POItem = Item.POItem
AND Date BETWEEN FORMAT(begin_date, 'dd/mm/yyyy') AND FORMAT(end_date, 'dd/mm/yyyy'))
//Anchoring max date in the interval for each item found by the second subquery
AND ItmDtEnd.MaxDate = (SELECT MAX(Item.Date)
FROM Item
WHERE
ItmDtEnd.PO = Item.PO
AND ItmDtEnd.POItem = Item.POItem
AND Date BETWEEN FORMAT(begin_date, 'dd/mm/yyyy') AND FORMAT(end_date, 'dd/mm/yyyy'))