Duplicating records to fill gap between dates

Question

I need to do something really weird, which is to create fake records in a view to fill the gap between posted dates of product prices.

Actually, my scenario is a little bit more complicated than that, but I've simplified to products/dates/prices.

Let's say we have this table:

create table PRICES_TEST
(
   PRICE_DATE    date          not null,
   PRODUCT       varchar2(13) not null,
   PRICE         number
);

alter table PRICES_TEST 
  add constraint PRICES_TEST_PK
    primary key (PRICE_DATE, PRODUCT);

With these records:

insert into PRICES_TEST values (date'2012-04-15', 'Screw Driver', 13);
insert into PRICES_TEST values (date'2012-04-18', 'Screw Driver', 15);

insert into PRICES_TEST values (date'2012-04-13', 'Hammer', 10);
insert into PRICES_TEST values (date'2012-04-16', 'Hammer', 15);
insert into PRICES_TEST values (date'2012-04-19', 'Hammer', 17);

selecting records will return me this:

PRICE_DATE                PRODUCT       PRICE                  
------------------------- ------------- ---------------------- 
13-Apr-2012 00:00:00      Hammer        10                     
16-Apr-2012 00:00:00      Hammer        15                     
19-Apr-2012 00:00:00      Hammer        17                     
15-Apr-2012 00:00:00      Screw Driver  13                     
18-Apr-2012 00:00:00      Screw Driver  15                     

Assuming today is Apr 21 2012, I need a view that shall repeat each price every day until a new price is posted. Like this:

PRICE_DATE                PRODUCT       PRICE                  
------------------------- ------------- ---------------------- 
13-Apr-2012 00:00:00      Hammer        10                     
14-Apr-2012 00:00:00      Hammer        10                     
15-Apr-2012 00:00:00      Hammer        10                     
16-Apr-2012 00:00:00      Hammer        15                     
17-Apr-2012 00:00:00      Hammer        15                     
18-Apr-2012 00:00:00      Hammer        15                     
19-Apr-2012 00:00:00      Hammer        17                     
20-Apr-2012 00:00:00      Hammer        17                     
21-Apr-2012 00:00:00      Hammer        17                     
15-Apr-2012 00:00:00      Screw Driver  13                     
16-Apr-2012 00:00:00      Screw Driver  13                     
17-Apr-2012 00:00:00      Screw Driver  13                     
18-Apr-2012 00:00:00      Screw Driver  15                     
19-Apr-2012 00:00:00      Screw Driver  15                     
20-Apr-2012 00:00:00      Screw Driver  15                     
21-Apr-2012 00:00:00      Screw Driver  15                     

Any ideas how to do that? I cannot really use other auxiliary tables, triggers nor PL/SQL programming, I really need to do this using a view.

I think this can be done using oracle analytics, but I'm not familiar with that. I tried to read this http://www.club-oracle.com/articles/analytic-functions-i-introduction-164/ but I didn't get it at all.

Answer 1

You can create a row generator statement using the CONNECT BY LEVEL syntax, cross joined with the distinct products in your table, and then outer join that to your prices table. The final touch is to use the LAST_VALUE function and IGNORE NULLS to repeat the price until a new value is encountered, and since you wanted a view, with a CREATE VIEW statement:

create view dense_prices_test as
select
    dp.price_date
  , dp.product
  , last_value(pt.price ignore nulls) over (order by dp.product, dp.price_date) price
from (
      -- Cross join with the distinct product set in prices_test
      select d.price_date, p.product
      from (
            -- Row generator to list all dates from first date in prices_test to today
            with dates as (select min(price_date) beg_date, sysdate end_date from prices_test)
            select dates.beg_date + level - 1 price_date 
            from dual
            cross join dates
            connect by level <= dates.end_date - dates.beg_date + 1
            ) d
      cross join (select distinct product from prices_test) p
     ) dp
left outer join prices_test pt on pt.price_date = dp.price_date and pt.product = dp.product;

Answer 2

I think I have a solution using an incremental approach toward the final result with CTE's:

with mindate as
(
  select min(price_date) as mindate from PRICES_TEST
)
,dates as
(
  select mindate.mindate + row_number() over (order by 1) - 1 as thedate from mindate,
    dual d connect by level <= floor(SYSDATE - mindate.mindate) + 1
)
,productdates as
(
  select p.product, d.thedate
  from (select distinct product from PRICES_TEST) p, dates d
)
,ranges as
(
  select
    pd.product,
    pd.thedate,
    (select max(PRICE_DATE) from PRICES_TEST p2
     where p2.product = pd.product and p2.PRICE_DATE <= pd.thedate) as mindate
    from productdates pd
)
select 
    r.thedate,
    r.product,
    p.price
from ranges r
inner join PRICES_TEST p on r.mindate = p.price_date and r.product = p.product
order by r.product, r.thedate

• mindate retrieves the earliest possible date in the data set
• dates generates a calendar of dates from earliest possible date to today.
• productdates cross joins all possible products with all possible dates
• ranges determines which price date applied at each date
• the final query links which price date applied to the actual price and filters out dates for which there are no relevant price dates via the inner join condition

Demo: http://www.sqlfiddle.com/#!4/e528f/126