Getting all previous records of table by date MySQL - mysql

Question

My table currently has 21000 records, it's daily updated and almost 300 entries are inserted. Now, what I want is to have a query which will fetch the counts of elements that my table had for the previous 10 days, so it returns:
26000
21300
21000
etc
Right now, I wrote this:
"SELECT COUNT(*) from tbl_task where `task_start_time` < '2020-12-01'"
And it returns 21000 but only for 1 day. I want by query to return records according to 10 days.
However, this does it for only 1 day.
edit : database flavor is mysql and date column is date not datetime

Answer 1

The most efficient method may be aggregation and cumulative sums:
select date(task_start_time) as dte, count(*) as cnt_on_day,
sum(count(*)) over (order by date(task_start_time)) as running_cnt
from tbl_task
group by dte
order by dte desc
limit 10;
This returns the last 10 days in the data. You can easily adjust to more days if you like -- in fact all of them -- without much trouble.

Answer 2

I don't know if I'm wrong, but could you not simple add a GROUP BY - statement? Like:
"SELECT COUNT(*) from tbl_task where `task_start_time` < '2020-12-01' GROUP
BY task_start_time"
EDIT:
This should only work if task_start_time is a date, not if it is a datetime
EDIT2:
If it is a datetime you could use the date function:
SELECT COUNT(*) from tbl_task where `task_start_time` < '2020-12-01' GROUP
BY DATE(task_start_time)

Answer 3

You can use UNION ALL and date arithmetic.
SELECT count(*)
FROM tbl_task
WHERE task_start_time < current_date
UNION ALL
SELECT count(*)
FROM tbl_task
WHERE task_start_time < date_sub(current_date, INTERVAL 1 DAY)
...
UNION ALL
SELECT count(*)
FROM tbl_task
WHERE task_start_time < date_sub(current_date, INTERVAL 9 DAY);
Edit:
You might also join a derived table that uses FROM-less SELECTs and UNION ALL to get the days to look back and then aggregate. This might be a little easier to construct dynamically. (But it may be slower I suspect.)
SELECT count(*)
FROM (SELECT 0 x
UNION ALL
SELECT 1
...
UNION ALL
SELECT 9)
INNER JOIN tbl_task t
ON t.task_start_time < date_sub(current_date, INTERVAL x.x DAY)
GROUP BY x.x;
In MySQL version 8+ you can even use a recursive CTE to construct the table with the days.
WITH RECURSIVE x
AS
(
SELECT 0 x
UNION ALL
SELECT x + 1
FROM x
WHERE x + 1 < 10
)
SELECT count(*)
FROM x
INNER JOIN tbl_task t
ON t.task_start_time < date_sub(current_date, INTERVAL x.x DAY)
GROUP BY x.x;