Re: Extracting superlatives - SQL design philosophy

You could do:

select
    B.City,
    MaxCityTemp.Temp,
    min(B.Date) as FirstMaxDate
from bar b
    INNER JOIN (select city,max(temp) as Temp from Bar group by City) as
MaxCityTemp
    ON B.City=MaxCityTemp.City
Group by
    B.City,
    MaxCityTemp.Temp

George Sexton
MH Software, Inc.
http://www.mhsoftware.com/
Voice: 303 438 9585


> -----Original Message-----
> From: pgsql-performance-owner@postgresql.org [mailto:pgsql-performance-
> owner@postgresql.org] On Behalf Of Dave Crooke
> Sent: Wednesday, February 24, 2010 2:31 PM
> To: pgsql-performance
> Subject: [PERFORM] Extracting superlatives - SQL design philosophy
>
> This is a generic SQL issue and not PG specific, but I'd like to get
> an opinion from this list.
>
> Consider the following data:
>
> # \d bar
>                 Table "public.bar"
>  Column |            Type             | Modifiers
> --------+-----------------------------+-----------
>  city   | character varying(255)      |
>  temp   | integer                     |
>  date   | timestamp without time zone |
>
> # select * from bar order by city, date;
>    city    | temp |        date
> -----------+------+---------------------
>  Austin    |   75 | 2010-02-21 15:00:00
>  Austin    |   35 | 2010-02-23 15:00:00
>  Edinburgh |   42 | 2010-02-23 15:00:00
>  New York  |   56 | 2010-02-23 15:00:00
>  New York  |   78 | 2010-06-23 15:00:00
> (5 rows)
>
> If you want the highest recorded temperature for a city, that's easy
> to do, since the selection criteria works on the same column that we
> are extracing:
>
> # select city, max(temp) from bar group by city order by 1;
>    city    | max
> -----------+-----
>  Austin    |  75
>  Edinburgh |  42
>  New York  |  78
> (3 rows)
>
>
> However there is (AFAIK) no simple way in plain SQL to write a query
> that performs such an aggregation where the aggregation criteria is on
> one column and you want to return another, e.g. adding the the *date
> of* that highest temperature to the output above, or doing a query to
> get the most recent temperature reading for each city.
>
> What I'd like to do is something like the below (and I'm inventing
> mock syntax here, the following is not valid SQL):
>
> -- Ugly implicit syntax but no worse than an Oracle outer join ;-)
> select city, temp, date from bar where date=max(date) group by city,
> temp order by city;
>
> or perhaps
>
> -- More explicit
> select aggregate_using(max(date), city, temp, date) from bar group by
> city, temp order by city;
>
> Both of the above, if they existed, would be a single data access
> followed by and sort-merge.
>
> The only way I know how to do it involves doing two accesses to the
> data, e.g.
>
> # select city, temp, date from bar a where date=(select max(b.date)
> from bar b where a.city=b.city) order by 1;
>    city    | temp |        date
> -----------+------+---------------------
>  Austin    |   35 | 2010-02-23 15:00:00
>  Edinburgh |   42 | 2010-02-23 15:00:00
>  New York  |   78 | 2010-06-23 15:00:00
> (3 rows)
>
>
> # explain select * from bar a where date=(select max(b.date) from bar
> b where a.city=b.city) order by 1;
>                                 QUERY PLAN
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---
>  Sort  (cost=1658.86..1658.87 rows=1 width=528)
>    Sort Key: a.city
>    ->  Seq Scan on bar a  (cost=0.00..1658.85 rows=1 width=528)
>          Filter: (date = (subplan))
>          SubPlan
>            ->  Aggregate  (cost=11.76..11.77 rows=1 width=8)
>                  ->  Seq Scan on bar b  (cost=0.00..11.75 rows=1
> width=8)     -- would be an index lookup in a real scenario
>                        Filter: (($0)::text = (city)::text)
> (8 rows)
>
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