I know there are lots of these types of questions, but i didn't see one that was similar enough to my criteria. So i'd like to ask for your help please. The fields i have are just start and end which are of time types. I cannot involve any specific dates in this. If the time ranges don't go pass midnight across day, i'd just compare two tuples as such:
end1 > start2 AND start1 < end2
(end points touching are not considered overlapped here.)
But when I involve time range that pass (or at) midnight, this obviously doesn't work. For example, given:
start | end
--------+--------
06:00PM | 01:00AM
03:00PM | 09:00PM
Without involving dates, how can i achieve this, please. My assumption is, if end is less than start, then we're involving 2 days.
I'm trying to do this in plain standard SQL, so just a simple and concise logic in the WHERE clause.
Thank you everyone!
Added:
Also, how would I test if one time range completely envelopes another? thanks again!
If your SQL supports time differences:
(end1 - start1) > (start2 - start1) AND (end2 - start2) > (start1 - start2)
Unfortunately, "plain" SQL will be too general to use against an actual database. The reason is that the various database products have different levels of support for calculating the duration between two times. For example, in SQL Server 2008, it would be substantially simpler to convert the time values to DateTime and then do the comparison since many comparison operators are not supported on the Time data type.
Select ...
From (
Select Cast(T.Start1 As DateTime) As Start1
, Case
When Cast(T.Start1 As DateTime) > Cast(T.End1 As DateTime) Then DateAdd(d,1,Cast(T.End1 As DateTime))
Else Cast(T.End1 As DateTime)
End As End1
From ...
) As T
Where T.End1 > T2.Start2 And T1.Start2 < T2.End2
use start time and duration (in minutes or whatever unit is appropriate)
The program Transtar had this problem. The time data was not associated with any date, nor was the time data in a date time field. The program initially was designed to issue transit itinaries from about 4AM to midnight which worked fine as long as the transit wasn't around the clock. I built a function which did a sliding test for the times so that if you asked for 5AM it would look at times from 1AM to 12:59AM. I wrote it in FORTRAN, but the algorythm would be the same regardless of language.
Related
I'd like some advices to know if what I need to do is achievable with timescale functions.
I've just found out I can use time_bucket_gapfill() to complete missing data, which is amazing! I need data each 5 minutes but I can receive 10 minutes, 30 minutes or 1 hour data. So the function helps me to complete the missing points in order to have only 5 minutes points. Also, I use locf() to set the gapfilled value with last value found.
My question is: can I set a max range when I set the last value found with locf() in order to never overpass 1 hour ?
Example: If the last value found is older than 1 hour ago I don't want to fill gaps, I need to leave it empty to say we have real missing values here.
I think I'm close to something with this but apparently I'm not allowed to use locf() in the same case.
ERROR: multiple interpolate/locf function calls per resultset column not supported
Somebody have an idea how I can resolve that?
How to reproduce:
Create table powers
CREATE table powers (
delivery_point_id BIGINT NOT NULL,
at timestamp NOT NULL,
value BIGINT NOT NULL
);
Create hypertable
SELECT create_hypertable('powers', 'at');
Create indexes
CREATE UNIQUE INDEX idx_dpid_at ON powers(delivery_point_id, at);
CREATE INDEX index_at ON powers(at);
Insert data for one day, one delivery point, point 10 minutes
INSERT INTO powers SELECT 1, at, round(random()*10000) FROM generate_series(TIMESTAMP '2021-01-01 00:00:00', TIMESTAMP '2022-01-02 00:00:00', INTERVAL '10 minutes') AS at;
Remove three hours of data from 4am to 7am
DELETE FROM powers WHERE delivery_point_id = 1 AND at < '2021-01-1 07:00:00' AND at > '2021-01-01 04:00:00';
The query that need to be fixed
SELECT
time_bucket_gapfill('5 minutes', at) AS point_five,
avg(value) AS avg,
CASE
WHEN (locf(at) - at) > interval '1 hour' THEN null
ELSE locf(avg(value))
END AS gapfilled
FROM powers
GROUP BY point_five, at
ORDER BY point_five;
Actual: ERROR: multiple interpolate/locf function calls per resultset column not supported
Expected: Gapfilled values each 5 minutes except between 4am and 7 am (real missing values).
This is a great question! I'm going to provide a workaround for how to do this with the current stuff, but I think it'd be great if you'd open a Github issue as well, because there might be a way to add an option for this that doesn't require a workaround like this.
I also think your attempt was a good approach and just requires a few tweaks to get it right!
The error that you're seeing is that we can't have multiple locf calls in a single column, this is a limitation that's pretty easy to work around as we can just shift both of them into a subquery, but that's not enough. The other thing that we need to change is that locf only works on aggregates, right now, you’re trying to use it on a column (at) that isn’t aggregated, which isn’t going to work, because it wouldn’t know which of the values of at in a time_bucket to “pull forward” for the gapfill.
Now you said you want to fill data as long as the previous point wasn’t more than one hour ago, so, we can take the last value of at in the bucket by using last(at, at) this is also the max(at) so either of those aggregates would work. So we put that into a CTE (common table expression or WITH query) and then we do the case statement outside like so:
WITH filled as (SELECT
time_bucket_gapfill('5 minutes', at) AS point_five,
avg(value) AS avg,
locf(last(at, at)) as filled_from,
locf(avg(value)) as filled_avg
FROM powers
WHERE at BETWEEN '2021-01-01 01:30:00' AND '2021-01-01 08:30:00'
AND delivery_point_id = 1
GROUP BY point_five
ORDER BY point_five)
SELECT point_five,
avg,
filled_from,
CASE WHEN point_five - filled_from > '1 hour'::interval THEN NULL
ELSE filled_avg
END as gapfilled
FROM filled;
Note that I’ve tried to name my CTE expressively so that it’s a little easier to read!
Also, I wanted to point out a couple other hyperfunctions that you might think about using:
heartbeat_agg is a new/experimental one that will help you determine periods when your system is up or down, so if you're expecting points at least every hour, you can use it to find the periods where the delivery point was down or the like.
When you have more irregular sampling or want to deal with different data frequencies from different delivery points, I’d take a look a the time_weight family of functions. They can be more efficient than using something like gapfill to upsample, by instead letting you treat all the different sample rates similarly, without having to create more points and more work to do so. Even if you want to, for instance, compare sums of values, you’d use something like integral to get the time weighted sum over a period based on the locf interpolation.
Anyway, hope all that is helpful!
Scenario
A user selects a date. Based on the selection I check whether the date & time is booked or not (No issues here).
If a date & time is booked, I need to show them n alternative dates. Based on their date and time parameters, and those proposed alternative dates have to be as close as to their chosen date as possible. The list of alternative dates should start from the date the query is ran on My backend handles this.
My Progress So Far
SELECT alternative_date
FROM GENERATE_SERIES(
TIMESTAMP '2022-08-20 05:00:00',
date_trunc('month', TIMESTAMP '2022-08-20 07:00:00') + INTERVAL '1 month - 1 day',
INTERVAL '1 day'
) AS G(alternative_date)
WHERE NOT EXISTS(
SELECT * FROM events T
WHERE T.bookDate::DATE = G.alternative_date::DATE
)
The code above uses the GENERATE_SERIES(...) function in PSQL. It searches for all dates, starting from 2022-08-20, and up to the end of August. It specifically returns the dates which does not exist in the bookDate column (Meaning it has not yet been booked).
Problems I Need Help With
When searching for alternative dates, I'm providing 3 important things
The user's preferred booking date, so I can suggest which other dates are close to him that he can choose? How would I go about doing this? It's the part where I'm facing most trouble.
The user's start and end times, so when providing a list of alternative dates, I can tell him, hey there's free space between 06 and 07 on the date 2022-08-22 for instance. I'm also facing some issues here, a push in the right track will be great!
I want to add another WHERE but it fails, the current WHERE is a NOT EXISTS so it looks for all dates not equaling to what is given. My other WHERE basically means WHERE the place is open for booking or not.
To get closest free dates, you can ORDER BY your result by "distance" of particular alternative date to user's preferred date - the shortest intervals will be first:
ORDER BY alternative_date - TIMESTAMP '2022-08-20 05:00:00'
If you want to recommend time slots smaller than whole dates (hour range), you need to switch the whole thing from dates to hours, i.e. generate_series from 1 day to 1 hour (or whatever your smallest bookable unit is) and excluse invalid hours (nighttime I assume) in WHERE. From there, it is pretty much the same as with dates.
As for "second where", there can be only one WHERE, but it can be composed from multiple conditions - you can add more conditions using AND operator (and it can also be sub-query if needed):
WHERE NOT EXISTS(
SELECT * FROM events T
WHERE T.bookDate::DATE = G.alternative_date::DATE
) AND NOT EXISTS (
SELECT 1 FROM events WHERE "roomId" = '13b46460-162d-4d32-94c0-e27dd9246c79'
)
(warning: this second sub-query is probably dangerous in real world, since the room will be used more than one time, I assume, so you need to add some time condition to the subquery to check against date)
suppose I have a table MyTable with a column some_date (date type of course) and I want to select the newest 3 months data (or x days).
What is the best way to achieve this?
Please notice that the date should not be measured from today but rather from the date range in the table (which might be older then today)
I need to find the maximum date and compare it to each row - if the difference is less than x days, return it.
All of this should be done with sqlalchemy and without loading the entire table.
What is the best way of doing it? must I have a subquery to find the maximum date? How do I select last X days?
Any help is appreciated.
EDIT:
The following query works in Oracle but seems inefficient (is max calculated for each row?) and I don't think that it'll work for all dialects:
select * from my_table where (select max(some_date) from my_table) - some_date < 10
You can do this in a single query and without resorting to creating datediff.
Here is an example I used for getting everything in the past day:
one_day = timedelta(hours=24)
one_day_ago = datetime.now() - one_day
Message.query.filter(Message.created > one_day_ago).all()
You can adapt the timedelta to whatever time range you are interested in.
UPDATE
Upon re-reading your question it looks like I failed to take into account the fact that you want to compare two dates which are in the database rather than today's day. I'm pretty sure that this sort of behavior is going to be database specific. In Postgres, you can use straightforward arithmetic.
Operations with DATEs
1. The difference between two DATES is always an INTEGER, representing the number of DAYS difference
DATE '1999-12-30' - DATE '1999-12-11' = INTEGER 19
You may add or subtract an INTEGER to a DATE to produce another DATE
DATE '1999-12-11' + INTEGER 19 = DATE '1999-12-30'
You're probably using timestamps if you are storing dates in postgres. Doing math with timestamps produces an interval object. Sqlalachemy works with timedeltas as a representation of intervals. So you could do something like:
one_day = timedelta(hours=24)
Model.query.join(ModelB, Model.created - ModelB.created < interval)
I haven't tested this exactly, but I've done things like this and they have worked.
I ended up doing two selects - one to get the max date and another to get the data
using the datediff recipe from this thread I added a datediff function and using the query q = session.query(MyTable).filter(datediff(max_date, some_date) < 10)
I still don't think this is the best way, but untill someone proves me wrong, it will have to do...
Whenever you write a query where you need to filter out rows on a range of values - then should I use the BETWEEN clause or <= and >= ?
Which one is better in performance?
Neither. They create exactly the same execution plan.
The times where I use them depends not on performance, but on the data.
If the data are Discrete Values, then I use BETWEEN...
x BETWEEN 0 AND 9
But if the data are Continuous Values, then that doesn't work so well...
x BETWEEN 0.000 AND 9.999999999999999999
Instead, I use >= AND <...
x >= 0 AND x < 10
Interestingly, however, the >= AND < technique actually works for both Continuous and Discrete data types. So, in general, I rarely use BETWEEN at all.
Also, don't use BETWEEN for date/time range queries.
What does the following really mean?
BETWEEN '20120201' AND '20120229'
Some people think that means get me the all the data from February, including all of the data anytime on February 29th. The above gets translated to:
BETWEEN '20120201 00:00:00.000' AND '20120229 00:00:00.000'
So if there is data on the 29th any time after midnight, your report is going to be incomplete.
People also try to be clever and pick the "end" of the day:
BETWEEN '00:00:00.000' AND '23:59:59.997'
That works if the data type is datetime. If it is smalldatetime the end of the range gets rounded up, and you may include data from the next day that you didn't mean to. If it's datetime2 you might actually miss a small portion of data that happened in the last 2+ milliseconds of the day. In most cases statistically irrelevant, but if the query is wrong, the query is wrong.
So for date range queries I always strongly recommend using an open-ended range, e.g. to report on the month of February the WHERE clause would say "on or after February 1st, and before March 1st" as follows:
WHERE date_col >= '20120201' AND date_col < '20120301'
BETWEEN can work as expected using the date type only, but I still prefer an open-ended range in queries because later someone may change that underlying data type to allow it to include time.
I blogged a lot more details here:
What do BETWEEN and the devil have in common?
I have a table where each row has a start and stop date-time. These can be arbitrarily short or long spans.
I want to query the sum duration of the intersection of all rows with two start and stop date-times.
How can you do this in MySQL?
Or do you have to select the rows that intersect the query start and stop times, then calculate the actual overlap of each row and sum it client-side?
To give an example, using milliseconds to make it clearer:
Some rows:
ROW START STOP
1 1010 1240
2 950 1040
3 1120 1121
And we want to know the sum time that these rows were between 1030 and 1100.
Lets compute the overlap of each row:
ROW INTERSECTION
1 70
2 10
3 0
So the sum in this example is 80.
If your example should have said 70 in the first row then
assuming #range_start and #range_end as your condition paramters:
SELECT SUM( LEAST(#range_end, stop) - GREATEST(#range_start, start) )
FROM Table
WHERE #range_start < stop AND #range_end > start
using the greatest/least and date functions you should be able to get what you need directly operating on the date type.
I fear you're out of luck.
Since you don't know the number of rows that you will be "cumulatively intersecting", you need either a recursive solution, or an aggregation operator.
The aggregation operator you need is no option because SQL does not have the data type that it is supposed to operate on (that type being an interval type, as described in "Temporal Data and the Relational Model").
The recursive solution may be possible, but it is likely to be difficult to write, difficult to read to other programmers, and it is also questionable whether the optimizer can turn that query into the optimal data access strategy.
Or I misunderstood your question.
There's a fairly interesting solution if you know the maximum time you'll ever have. Create a table with all the numbers in it from one to your maximum time.
millisecond
-----------
1
2
3
...
1240
Call it time_dimension (this technique is often used in dimensional modelling in data warehousing.)
Then this:
SELECT
COUNT(*)
FROM
your_data
INNER JOIN time_dimension ON time_dimension.millisecond BETWEEN your_data.start AND your_data.stop
WHERE
time_dimension.millisecond BETWEEN 1030 AND 1100
...will give you the total number of milliseconds of running time between 1030 and 1100.
Of course, whether you can use this technique depends on whether you can safely predict the maximum number of milliseconds that will ever be in your data.
This is often used in data warehousing, as I said; it fits well with some kinds of problems -- for example, I've used it for insurance systems, where a total number of days between two dates was needed, and where the overall date range of the data was easy to estimate (from the earliest customer date of birth to a date a couple of years into the future, beyond the end date of any policies that were being sold.)
Might not work for you, but I figured it was worth sharing as an interesting technique!
After you added the example, it is clear that indeed I misunderstood your question.
You are not "cumulatively intersecting rows".
The steps that will bring you to a solution are :
intersect each row's start and end point with the given start and end points. This should be doable using CASE expressions or something of that nature, something in the style of :
SELECT (CASE startdate < givenstartdate : givenstartdate, CASE startdate >= givenstartdate : startdate) as retainedstartdate, (likewise for enddate) as retainedenddate FROM ... Cater for nulls and that sort of stuff as needed.
With the retainedstartdate and retainedenddate, use a date function to compute the length of the retained interval (which is the overlap of your row with the given time section).
SELECT the SUM() of those.