Question

I’m at work and need to SUM specific value by hour. Lets say a shift is 10 hours, I want to be able to loop and do the following pseudo code in PLSQL:

For (int i=0; i<10; i++) {
    SUM( DB.Sales) AS Hour#i
    FROM
         DB
    WHERE DB.sale_Time BETWEEN 
    DB.Shift_Start_Time + i AND
    DB.Shift_Start_Time + (i+1)
}

It should return a table with 11 columns, one for the time of the shift and each of the other columns sums the sales of an hour in the 10 hours shift, and each will be named after the hour it represents.
Basically I want to use it for other purposes, as my work has nothing to do with sales, where “i” can be as big as 1000 so I’m looking for a generic solution to my problem.

Again, I am using PLSQL.

Help will be very appreciated!

Thank you

Answer 1

I eventually gave up on my original demands and found a nice and simple way to loop through the hours using:

SELECT
db.shift_start_time,
T1.n AS Hour,
SUM(db.sales) AS Hourly_Sales
FROM
db,
(SELECT n FROM
(SELECT rownum n FROM DUAL CONNECT BY LEVEL <=10) WHERE n > 0) T1
WHERE
db.sale_time BETWEEN db.shift_start_time+(T1.n – 1)/24 AND db.shift_start_time + (T1.n)/24
GROUP BY
db.shift_start_time,
T1.n
ORDER BY
db.shift_start_time,
T1.n

It also solved my problem where hours are not rounded. If a shift starts at 9:45 it will work as expected and not round it to 9 or 10.

Only issue I have with this solution is that there is a separate row for each hour.. nevertheless , it’s still the best solution yet.