How to merge time intervals in SQL Server

Question

Suppose I have the following an event table with personId, startDate and endDate.

I want to know how much time the person X spent doing an event (the events can override each other).

If the person just has 1 event, its easy: datediff(dd, startDate, endDate)

If the person has 2 events it gets tricky.

I'll set some scenarios for the expected results.

Scenario 1

startDate endDate
1         4
3         5

This means he the results should be the datediff from 1 to 5

Scenario 2

startDate endDate
1         3
6         9

this means he the results should be the some of datediff(dd,1,3) and datediff(dd,6,9)

How can I get this result on an sql query? I can only think of a bunch of if statements, but the same person can have n events so the query will be really confusing.

Shredder Edit: I'd like to add a 3rd scenario:

startDate endDate
1       5
4       8
11      15

Desired result to Shredder scenario:

(1,5) and (4,8) merge in (1,8) since they overlap then we need to datediff(1,8) + datediff(11,15) => 7 + 4 => 11

Answer 1

You can use a recursive CTE to build a list of dates and then count the distinct dates.

declare @T table
(
  startDate date,
  endDate date
);

insert into @T values
('2011-01-01', '2011-01-05'),
('2011-01-04', '2011-01-08'),
('2011-01-11', '2011-01-15');

with C as
(
  select startDate,
         endDate
  from @T
  union all
  select dateadd(day, 1, startDate),
         endDate
  from C
  where dateadd(day, 1, startDate) < endDate       
)
select count(distinct startDate) as DayCount
from C
option (MAXRECURSION 0)

Result:

DayCount
-----------
11

Or you can use a numbers table. Here I use master..spt_values:

declare @MinStartDate date
select @MinStartDate = min(startDate)
from @T

select count(distinct N.number)
from @T as T
  inner join master..spt_values as N
    on dateadd(day, N.Number, @MinStartDate) between T.startDate and dateadd(day, -1, T.endDate)
where N.type = 'P'    

Answer 2

Here's a solution that uses the Tally table idea (which I first heard of in an article by Itzk Ben-Gan -- I still cut and paste his code whenver the subject comes up). The idea is to generate a list of ascending integers, join the source data by range against the numbers, and then count the number of distinct numbers, as follows. (This code uses syntax from SQL Server 2008, but with minor modifications would work in SQL 2005.)

First set up some testing data:

CREATE TABLE #EventTable
 (
   PersonId   int  not null
  ,startDate  datetime  not null
  ,endDate    datetime  not null
 )

INSERT #EventTable
 values (1, 'Jan 1, 2011', 'Jan 4, 2011')
       ,(1, 'Jan 3, 2011', 'Jan 5, 2011')
       ,(2, 'Jan 1, 2011', 'Jan 3, 2011')
       ,(2, 'Jan 6, 2011', 'Jan 9, 2011')

Determine some initial values

DECLARE @Interval bigint ,@FirstDay datetime ,@PersonId int = 1 -- (or whatever)

Get the first day and the maximum possible number of dates (to keep the cte from generating extra values):

SELECT
   @Interval = datediff(dd, min(startDate), max(endDate)) + 1
  ,@FirstDay = min(startDate)
 from #EventTable
 where PersonId = @PersonId

Cut and paste over the one routine and modify and test it to only return as many integers as we'll need:

/*
;WITH
  Pass0 as (select 1 as C union all select 1), --2 rows
  Pass1 as (select 1 as C from Pass0 as A, Pass0 as B),--4 rows
  Pass2 as (select 1 as C from Pass1 as A, Pass1 as B),--16 rows
  Pass3 as (select 1 as C from Pass2 as A, Pass2 as B),--256 rows
  Pass4 as (select 1 as C from Pass3 as A, Pass3 as B),--65536 rows
  Pass5 as (select 1 as C from Pass4 as A, Pass4 as B),--4,294,967,296 rows
  Tally as (select row_number() over(order by C) as Number from Pass5)
 select Number from Tally where Number <= @Interval
*/

And now revise it by first joining to the intervals defined in each source row, and then count each distinct value found:

;WITH
  Pass0 as (select 1 as C union all select 1), --2 rows
  Pass1 as (select 1 as C from Pass0 as A, Pass0 as B),--4 rows
  Pass2 as (select 1 as C from Pass1 as A, Pass1 as B),--16 rows
  Pass3 as (select 1 as C from Pass2 as A, Pass2 as B),--256 rows
  Pass4 as (select 1 as C from Pass3 as A, Pass3 as B),--65536 rows
  Pass5 as (select 1 as C from Pass4 as A, Pass4 as B),--4,294,967,296 rows
  Tally as (select row_number() over(order by C) as Number from Pass5)
SELECT PersonId, count(distinct Number) EventDays
 from #EventTable et
  inner join Tally
   on dateadd(dd, Tally.Number - 1, @FirstDay) between et.startDate and et.endDate
 where et.PersonId = @PersonId
  and Number <= @Interval
 group by PersonId

Take out the @PersonId filter and you'd get it for all persons. And with minor modification you can do it for any time interval, not just days (which is why I set the Tally table to generate severely large numbers.)