Question

Say you’ve got a database like this:

books
-----
id
name

And you wanted to get the total number of books in the database, easiest possible sql:

"select count(id) from books"

But now you want to get the total number of books last month…

Edit: but some of the books have been
deleted from the table since last month

Well obviously you cant total for a month thats already past – the “books” table is always current and some of the records have already been deleted

My approach was to run a cron job (or scheduled task) at the end of the month and store the total in another table, called report_data, but this seems clunky. Any better ideas?

Answer 1

Add a default column that has the value GETDATE(), call it “DateAdded”. Then you can query between any two dates to find out how many books there were during that date period or you can just specify one date to find out how many books there were before a certain date (all the way into history).

Per comment: You should not delete, you should soft delete.