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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-31T07:51:55+00:00

Im making a simple booking system for our projectors at work. Here is the

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Im making a simple booking system for our projectors at work.

Here is the scenario. Each projectors can have its availability set to quarter hour segments throughout the entire day. i.e projector 1 is available between 8:15am – 1:45pm and 3pm-5:15pm each day (can also be changed to have different availabilities set for each day). A projector can be booked for anytime time segment during the day as long as it is available. So ive got that setup in my sql database (with my asp.net mvc front end).

The question i have is what is the best way to search on this scenario. i.e. UserA comes in and says find me the projectors that are available this friday between 12pm-3pm. Im struggling to write an efficient sql query that will filter this. My best option so far is to pull back all projectors and than programatically work out if they are available and not booked between this time. It works but it is incredibly inefficient. I stumbled an idea of using a temp table generated by a stored proc that can than be filtered but it isnt quite there.

Has anyone got any ideas how i could approach this?

Thanks in advance

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I would probably have a table called ProjectorReservations which contained a start time and end time (amongst other fields you might care about i.e. who is renting the projector).

    Searching a projector would look something like this:

    SELECT projectorName
FROM Projectors
WHERE NOT EXISTS 
   (SELECT 1 FROM ProjectorReservations
   WHERE Projectors.projectorName = ProjectorReservations.projectorName
   AND (ProjectorReservations.startTime < {end_time}
   OR ProjectorReservations.endTime > {start_time}))

    That pretty much checks to make sure no reservations start before the one you are looking for ends and vice versa. Obviously you will need to swap in your fields accordingly but that should give you the general idea

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