Question

I have an array filled with values (twitter ids) and I would like to find the missing data between the lowest id and the highest id? Any care to share a simple function or idea on how to do this?

Also, I was wondering if I can do the same with mySQL? I have the key indexed. The table contains 250k rows right now, so a temporary table and then a join wouldn’t be very fast or efficient. I could do a PHP loop to loop through the data, but that would also take a long time, and a great deal of memory. Is there a specific mysql query I can run? or can I somehow use the function from above with this?

Thanks,
James Hartig
http://twittertrend.net

Answer 1

I had a similar requirement and wrote a function that would return a list of missing IDs.

---------------------------
create function dbo.FreeIDs ()
---------------------------
returns @tbl table (FreeID int)

as
begin

    declare @Max int
    declare @i int

    select @Max = MAX(ID) from [TheTable]
    set @i = 0

    while @i < @Max begin
          set @i = @i + 1
          if not exists (select * from [TheTable] where ID = @i) 
             insert into @tbl select @i
    end

    return

end