Question

I have a report that I need to create from a UserHistory table in SQL Server 2008 R2. A sample is below:

For billing purposes we need to calculate how many distinct users have had a particular status across a particular period. The period can be as low as 1 day or up to something like 2 months. So if one user was active, not active and then active again across a period then that counts as one active user.

The curve ball now comes in to play. If I had no histories within the specified period, the stored proc needs to hunt for the first history entry before the start of the period to see if it matches the status. As obviously if I was active on the 20th of October and then my account was suspended on the 15th of November, if the period was for November, I was still active.

At first I did this with a cursor going through each User table, and doing the queries per user and it’s user histories however even with the relevant indexes this takes about 40 seconds for 200000 users. 40s for each day in a period for 9 statuses adds up very quickly.

My colleage and I came up with this method which has come the closest:

ALTER PROCEDURE [dbo].[cpUserHistory_CountByStatus] @StartDate DATETIME2,
    @EndDate DATETIME2,
    @Status VARCHAR(50)
AS
SET NOCOUNT ON

SELECT SUM(CASE WHEN CurrentMonth.UserId IS NOT NULL OR PreviousTime.UserId IS NOT NULL THEN 1 ELSE 0 END)
FROM [User]
LEFT JOIN
       (SELECT UserId
       FROM
              UserHistory
              INNER JOIN
                     (SELECT MAX(UserHistoryId) AS UserHistoryId
                     FROM UserHistory
                     WHERE EditedDate BETWEEN @StartDate AND @EndDate
                     GROUP BY UserId) LastStatus ON UserHistory.UserHistoryId = LastStatus.UserHistoryId
       WHERE UserHistory.Status = @Status                                -- EDIT: Your status you're interested in
       ) CurrentMonth ON [User].UserId = CurrentMonth.UserId
LEFT JOIN
       (SELECT UserId
       FROM
              UserHistory
              INNER JOIN
                     (SELECT MAX(UserHistoryId) AS UserHistoryId
                     FROM UserHistory
                     WHERE EditedDate < @StartDate
                     GROUP BY UserId) LastStatus ON UserHistory.UserHistoryId = LastStatus.UserHistoryId
       WHERE UserHistory.Status = @Status                               -- EDIT: Your status you're interested in
       ) PreviousTime ON [User].UserId = PreviousTime.UserId

But as you can see in the simplified report sample, a user was cancelled on the 3rd of the month and then reactivated on the 5th, however the total does not reflect that at some point in the period there was 1 cancelled user.

Does anyone have any ideas or better ways to go about doing this? I could really use some input.

Answer 1

I settled on calling a stored procedure once for the entire range which will bring back all UserHistory entries which matches my criteria and in code I can count and filter it as I please.

Not ideal as there could be quite a lot of data transfered from the DB to the application, and once in the app it can use a bit of memory – but it works, is fast and more importantly is accurate.

ALTER PROCEDURE [dbo].[cpUserHistory_SelectForBillingPeriod] @StartDate DATETIME2,
    @EndDate DATETIME2
AS
BEGIN
    DECLARE @Uh TABLE (
        UserHistoryId INT,
        UserId INT,
        UserStatus VARCHAR(50),
        EditedDate DATETIME2
        )

    INSERT INTO @Uh
    SELECT UserHistoryId,
        UserId,
        [Status],
        EditedDate
    FROM UserHistory
    WHERE EditedDate >= @StartDate
        AND EditedDate <= @EndDate

    INSERT INTO @Uh
    SELECT UserHistory.UserHistoryId,
        UserId,
        [Status],
        EditedDate
    FROM UserHistory
    INNER JOIN (
        SELECT MAX(UserHistoryId) AS UserHistoryId
        FROM UserHistory
        WHERE EditedDate < @StartDate
        GROUP BY UserId
        ) LastStatus ON UserHistory.UserHistoryId = LastStatus.UserHistoryId

    SELECT *
    FROM @Uh
    order by EditedDate desc