Question

I have a database table that has a structure like the one shown below:

CREATE TABLE dated_records (
              recdate DATE NOT NULL
              col1    DOUBLE NOT NULL,
              col2    DOUBLE NOT NULL,
              col3    DOUBLE NOT NULL,
              col4    DOUBLE NOT NULL,
              col5    DOUBLE NOT NULL,
              col6    DOUBLE NOT NULL,
              col7    DOUBLE NOT NULL,
              col8    DOUBLE NOT NULL
              );

I want to write an SQL statement that will allow me to return a record containing the changes between two supplied dates, for specified columns – e.g. col1, col2 and col3

for example, if I wanted to see how much the value in col1, col2 and col3 has changed during the interval between two dates. A dumb way of doing this would be to select the rows (separately) for each date and then difference the fields outside the db server –

SQL1 = "SELECT col1, col2 col3 FROM dated_records WHERE recdate='2001-01-01'";
SQL1 = "SELECT col1, col2 col3 FROM dated_records WHERE recdate='2001-02-01'";

however, I’m sure there there is a way a smarter way of performing the differencing using pure SQL. I am guessing that it will involve using a self join (and possibly a nested subquery), but I may be over complicating things – I decided it would be better to ask the SQL experts on here to see how they would solve this problem in the most efficient way.

Ideally the SQL should be DB agnostic, but if it needs to be tied to be a particular db, then it would have to be PostgreSQL.

Answer 1

Just select the two rows, join them into one, and subtract the values:

select d1.recdate, d2.recdate,
       (d2.col1 - d1.col1) as delta_col1,
       (d2.col2 - d1.col2) as delta_col2,
       ...
from (select *
      from dated_records
      where recdate = <date1>
     ) d1 cross join
     (select *
      from dated_records
      where recdate = <date2>
     ) d2