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Asked: 2026-05-13T13:18:53+00:00

Edit 1 (clarification): Thank you for the answers so far! The response is gratifying.

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Edit 1 (clarification): Thank you for the answers so far! The response is gratifying.
I want to clarify the question a little because based on the answers I think I did not describe one aspect of the problem correctly (and I’m sure that’s my fault as I was having a difficult time defining it even for myself).
Here’s the rub: The result set should contain ONLY the records with tstamp BETWEEN ‘2010-01-03’ AND ‘2010-01-09’, AND the one record where the tstamp IS NULL for each order_num in the first set (there will always be one with null tstamp for each order_num).
The answers given so far appear to include all records for a certain order_num if there are any with tstamp BETWEEN ‘2010-01-03’ AND ‘2010-01-09’. For example, if there were another record with order_num = 2 and tstamp = 2010-01-12 00:00:00 it should not be included in the result.

Original question:
Consider an orders table containing id (unique), order_num, tstamp (a timestamp), and item_id (the single item included in an order). tstamp is null, unless the order has been modified, in which case there is another record with identical order_num and tstamp then contains the timestamp of when the change occurred.

Example…

id  order_num  tstamp               item_id
__  _________  ___________________  _______
 0          1                           100
 1          2                           101
 2          2  2010-01-05 12:34:56      102
 3          3                           113
 4          4                           124
 5          5                           135
 6          5  2010-01-07 01:23:45      136
 7          5  2010-01-07 02:46:00      137
 8          6                           100
 9          6  2010-01-13 08:33:55      105

What is the most efficient SQL statement to retrieve all of the orders (based on order_num) which have been modified one or more times during a certain date range? In other words, for each order we need all of the records with the same order_num (including the one with NULL tstamp), for each order_num WHERE at least one of the order_num’s has tstamp NOT NULL AND tstamp BETWEEN ‘2010-01-03’ AND ‘2010-01-09’. It’s the “WHERE at least one of the order_num’s has tstamp NOT NULL” that I’m having difficulty with.

The result set should look like this:

id  order_num  tstamp               item_id
__  _________  ___________________  _______
 1          2                           101
 2          2  2010-01-05 12:34:56      102
 5          5                           135
 6          5  2010-01-07 01:23:45      136
 7          5  2010-01-07 02:46:00      137

The SQL that I came up with is this, which is essentially “A UNION (B in A)”, but it executes slowly and I hope there is a more efficient solution:

SELECT history_orders.order_id, history_orders.tstamp, history_orders.item_id
FROM
   (SELECT orders.order_id, orders.tstamp, orders.item_id
    FROM orders
    WHERE orders.tstamp BETWEEN '2010-01-03' AND '2010-01-09')
    AS history_orders
UNION
SELECT current_orders.order_id, current_orders.tstamp, current_orders.item_id
FROM
   (SELECT orders.order_id, orders.tstamp, orders.item_id
    FROM orders
    WHERE orders.tstamp IS NULL)
    AS current_orders
WHERE current_orders.order_id IN
   (SELECT orders.order_id
    FROM orders
    WHERE orders.tstamp BETWEEN '2010-01-03' AND '2010-01-09');
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Thank you again for all the suggestions. I found three solutions that work, including my original. At the end I’ve added some performance results, which are not as great as I had hoped. If anyone can improve on this I would be thrilled!

    1) The best solution found so far seems to be:

    SELECT history_orders.order_id, history_orders.tstamp, history_orders.item_id
FROM
   (SELECT orders.order_id, orders.tstamp, orders.item_id
    FROM orders
    WHERE orders.tstamp BETWEEN '2010-01-03' AND '2010-01-09'
    OR orders.tstamp IS NULL)
    AS history_orders
WHERE history_orders.order_id IN
   (SELECT orders.order_id
    FROM orders
    WHERE orders.tstamp BETWEEN '2010-01-03' AND '2010-01-09');

    2) I also tried using EXISTS in place of IN, which requires an additional WHERE clause in the last SELECT:

    SELECT history_orders.order_id, history_orders.tstamp, history_orders.item_id
FROM
   (SELECT orders.order_id, orders.tstamp, orders.item_id
    FROM orders
    WHERE orders.tstamp BETWEEN '2010-01-03' AND '2010-01-09'
    OR orders.tstamp IS NULL)
    AS history_orders
WHERE EXISTS
   (SELECT orders.order_id
    FROM orders
    WHERE history_orders.order_id = orders.order_id
    AND orders.tstamp BETWEEN '2010-01-03' AND '2010-01-09');

    3) And finally there is my original solution, using UNION.

    Comments:
    To comment on the table size, my actual “real world” problem involves 4 tables (connected with inner joins) containing 98, 2189, 43897, 785656 records respectively.

    Performance – I ran each solution three times and here are my real world results:
    1: 52, 51, 51 seconds
    2: 54, 54, 53 s
    3: 56, 56, 56 s

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