Question

The following User History table contains one record for every day a given user has accessed a website (in a 24 hour UTC period). It has many thousands of records, but only one record per day per user. If the user has not accessed the website for that day, no record will be generated.

Id      UserId   CreationDate
------  ------   ------------
750997      12   2009-07-07 18:42:20.723
750998      15   2009-07-07 18:42:20.927
751000      19   2009-07-07 18:42:22.283

What I’m looking for is a SQL query on this table with good performance, that tells me which userids have accessed the website for (n) continuous days without missing a day.

In other words, how many users have (n) records in this table with sequential (day-before, or day-after) dates? If any day is missing from the sequence, the sequence is broken and should restart again at 1; we’re looking for users who have achieved a continuous number of days here with no gaps.

Any resemblance between this query and a particular Stack Overflow badge is purely coincidental, of course.. 🙂

Answer 1

The answer is obviously:

SELECT DISTINCT UserId
FROM UserHistory uh1
WHERE (
       SELECT COUNT(*) 
       FROM UserHistory uh2 
       WHERE uh2.CreationDate 
       BETWEEN uh1.CreationDate AND DATEADD(d, @days, uh1.CreationDate)
      ) = @days OR UserId = 52551

EDIT:

Okay here’s my serious answer:

DECLARE @days int
DECLARE @seconds bigint
SET @days = 30
SET @seconds = (@days * 24 * 60 * 60) - 1
SELECT DISTINCT UserId
FROM (
    SELECT uh1.UserId, Count(uh1.Id) as Conseq
    FROM UserHistory uh1
    INNER JOIN UserHistory uh2 ON uh2.CreationDate 
        BETWEEN uh1.CreationDate AND 
            DATEADD(s, @seconds, DATEADD(dd, DATEDIFF(dd, 0, uh1.CreationDate), 0))
        AND uh1.UserId = uh2.UserId
    GROUP BY uh1.Id, uh1.UserId
    ) as Tbl
WHERE Conseq >= @days

EDIT:

[Jeff Atwood] This is a great fast solution and deserves to be accepted, but Rob Farley’s solution is also excellent and arguably even faster (!). Please check it out too!