EXPLAIN EXTENDED

On Jul 1, 2009, PostgreSQL 8.4 was released.

Among other imporvements, this version supports window functions, recursive queries and common table expressions (CTE's).

Despite being a minor release (accoring to the version numeration), this version can become quite a milestone, since these features make developer's life much, much easier.

Let's check how efficienly these features are implemented.

To do this, I'll take some tasks that I wrote about in the previous blog posts and try to reimplement them using new PostgreSQL features.

I'll start with quite a common task of flattening the intersecting timespans which I wrote about in this article:

• Flattening timespans: PostgreSQL

This task requires calculating a running maximum and taking a previous record from a recordset, and therefore is a good illustration for window functions.

A quick reminder of the problem, taken from Stack Overflow:

I have lots of data with start and stop times for a given ID and I need to flatten all intersecting and adjacent timespans into one combined timespan.

To make things a bit clearer, take a look at the sample data for 03.06.2009:

The following timespans are overlapping or contiunous and need to merge into one timespan:

date	start	stop
2009.06.03	05:54:48:000	10:00:13:000
2009.06.03	09:26:45:000	09:59:40:000

The resulting timespan would be from 05:54:48 to 10:00:13.

Since there's a gap between 10:00:13 and 10:12:50, we also have the following timespans:

date	start	stop
2009.06.03	10:12:50:000	10:27:25:000
2009.06.03	10:13:12:000	11:14:56:000
2009.06.03	10:27:25:000	10:27:31:000
2009.06.03	10:27:39:000	13:53:38:000
2009.06.03	11:14:56:000	11:15:03:000
2009.06.03	11:15:30:000	14:02:14:000
2009.06.03	13:53:38:000	13:53:43:000
2009.06.03	14:02:14:000	14:02:31:000

which result in one merged timespan from 10:12:50 to 14:02:31, since they're overlapping or adjacent.

Any solution, be it SQL or not, is appreciated.

Let's create a sample table:
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