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Archive for April 7th, 2010

Date ranges: overlapping with priority

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Answering questions asked on the site.

Jason Foster asks:

We have a table of student registrations:

Students
student_code course_code course_section session_cd
987654321 ESC102H1 Y 20085
998766543 ELEE203H F 20085

course_code and course_section identify a course, session_cd is an academic session, e. g. 20085, 20091, 20079.

The courses (stored in another table) have associated values for engineering design, complementary studies, etc., like that:

Courses
course_code course_section start_session end_session design science studies
ESC102H1 F 20071 20099 10 0 0
AER201Y1 Y 20059 NULL 0 0 30

, or like that:

In-house courses
course_code course_section student_code design science studies
ESC102H1 F 998766543 10 0 0

We are required by an external accreditation body to add up all of the units of engineering design, complementary studies, etc., taken by an individual student.

Where it gets really messy is that we have multiple data feeds for the associated values of courses. For example we have a set from the Registrar's Office, the Civil Department, our In-House version, etc.

The rule is that In-House beats Civil beats the Registrar's Office in the case of any duplication within the overlapping intervals.

The session_cd is of the form YYYY{1,5,9}.

Basically, we have three sets here.

To get the course hours for a given student we should find a record for him in the in-house set, or, failing that, find if the session is within the ranges of one of the external sets (Civil or Registrar). If both ranges contain the academic session the student took the course, Civil should be taken.

The first part is quite simple: we just LEFT JOIN students with the in-house courses and get the hours for the courses which are filled. The real problem is the next part: searching for the ranges containing a given value.

As I already mentioned in the previous posts, relational databases are not in general that efficient for the queries like that. It's easy to use an index to find a value of a column within a given range, but B-Tree indexes are of little help in searching for a range of two columns containing a given value.

However, in this case, the data domain of session_cd is quite a limited set. For each pair of session_start and session_end it is easy to create a set of all possible values between session_start and session_end.

The overlapping parts of the session ranges from the two sets will yields two records for each of the sessions belonging to the range. Of these two records we will need to take the relevant one (that is Civil) by using DISTINCT ON with the additional sorting on the source (Civil goes first).

Then we just join the relevant records to the subset of the students which does not have corresponding records in the in-house version.

Finally, we need to union this with the in-house recordset.
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Written by Quassnoi

April 7th, 2010 at 11:00 pm

Posted in PostgreSQL