Peter Hunsberger wrote on 13.10.2009 23:23:
I need a query to find the contiguous ranges within this column, in
this case returning the result set:

start, end
2, 5
11, 19
23, 23
32, 37

I have one solution that joins the table against itself and does
(among other things) a subselect looking "not exists col +1" and "not
exists col -1" on the two instances of the table to find the start and
end.  This is, as you might guess, is not very efficient (my actual
data is some 6 million+ rows) and I'm guessing there has to be
something more efficient with windowing or possibly grouping on min
and max (though I can't see how to make sure they are part of a
contiguous set).  Anyone have any ideas?

This is the best I can put together right now.

Not very nice, but currently I can't think of a better solution:

select * from (
 select soi as start_of_interval,
case when soi is not null and eoi is null then lead(eoi) over()
          when soi is not null and eoi is not null then eoi
          else null
        end as end_of_interval
 from (
select case when col - (lag(col,1,col + 1) over (order by col)) - 1 <> 0 then col
              else null
            end as soi,
case when col - (lead(col,1,col + 1) over (order by col)) + 1 <> 0 then col else null
            end as eoi
     from numbers
 ) t1
 where t1.soi is not null
    or t1.eoi is not null
) t2
where t2.start_of_interval is not null and t2.end_of_interval is not null;

The outer-most select is needed to get rid of the "empty" rows. I couldn't find 
a way to push that into one of the sub-queries.

The execution plan doesn't look too bad (probably better than your plan with a self join and a subselect), but it does sort the whole table which might be a problem.
Regards
Thomas






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