Merging data in a single SQL table without a Cursor

Question

I have a table with an ID column and another column with a number. One ID can have multiple numbers. For example

ID | Number
 1 |  25
 1 |  26
 1 |  30
 1 |  24
 2 |  4
 2 |  8
 2 |  5

Now based of this data, in a new table, I want to have this

ID | Low | High 
1  |  24 |  26
1  |  30 |  30
2  |  4  |  5
2  |  8  |  8

As you can see, I want to merge any data where the numbers are consecutive, like 24, 25, 26. So now the low was 24, the high was 26, and then 30 is still a separate range. I am dealing with large amounts of data, so I would prefer to not use a cursor for performance sake (which is what I was previously doing, and was slowing things down quite a bit)...What is the best way to achieve this? I'm no SQL pro, so I'm not sure if there is a function available that could make this easier, or what the fastest way to accomplish this would be.

Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

The key observation is that a sequence of numbers minus another sequence is a constant. We can generate another sequence using row_number. This identifies all the groups:

select id, MIN(number) as low, MAX(number) as high
from (select t.*,
             (number - ROW_NUMBER() over (partition by id order by number) ) as groupnum
      from t
     ) t
group by id, groupnum

The rest is just aggregation.