Generating complex sql tables - mysql

Question

I currently have an employee logging sql table that has 3 columns
fromState: String,
toState: String,
timestamp: DateTime
fromState is either In or Out. In means employee came in and Out means employee went out. Each row can only transition from In to Out or Out to In.
I'd like to generate a temporary table in sql to keep track during a given hour (hour by hour), how many employees are there in the company. Aka, resulting table has columns HourBucket, NumEmployees.
In non-SQL code I can do this by initializing the numEmployees as 0 and go through the table row by row (sorted by timestamp) and add (employee came in) or subtract (went out) to numEmployees (bucketed by timestamp hour).
I'm clueless as how to do this in SQL. Any clues?

Answer 1

Use a COUNT ... GROUP BY query. Can't see what you're using toState from your description though! Also, assuming you have an employeeID field.
E.g.
SELECT fromState AS 'Status', COUNT(*) AS 'Number'
FROM StaffinBuildingTable
INNER JOIN (SELECT employeeID AS 'empID', MAX(timestamp) AS 'latest' FROM StaffinBuildingTable GROUP BY employeeID) AS LastEntry ON StaffinBuildingTable.employeeID = LastEntry.empID
GROUP BY fromState
The LastEntry subquery will produce a list of employeeIDs limited to the last timestamp for each employee.
The INNER JOIN will limit the main table to just the employeeIDs that match both sides.
The outer GROUP BY produces the count.
SELECT HOUR(SBT.timestamp) AS 'Hour', SBT.fromState AS 'Status', COUNT(*) AS 'Number'
FROM StaffinBuildingTable AS SBT
INNER JOIN (
SELECT SBIJ.employeeID AS 'empID', MAX(timestamp) AS 'latest'
FROM StaffinBuildingTable AS SBIJ
WHERE DATE(SBIJ.timestamp) = CURDATE()
GROUP BY SBIJ.employeeID) AS LastEntry ON SBT.employeeID = LastEntry.empID
GROUP BY SBT.fromState, HOUR(SBT.timestamp)
Replace CURDATE() with whatever date you are interested in.
Note this is non-optimal as it calculates the HOUR twice - once for the data and once for the group.
Again you are using the INNER JOIN to limit the number of returned row, this time to the last timestamp on a given day.

Answer 2

To me your description of the FromState and ToState seem the wrong way round, I'd expect to doing this based on the ToState. But assuming I'm wrong on that the following should point you in the right direction:
First, I create a "Numbers" table containing 24 rows one for each hour of the day:
create table tblHours
(Number int);
insert into tblHours values
(0),(1),(2),(3),(4),(5),(6),(7),
(8),(9),(10),(11),(12),(13),(14),(15),
(16),(17),(18),(19),(20),(21),(22),(23);
Then for each date in your employee logging table, I create a row in another new table to contain your counts:
create table tblDailyHours
(
HourBucket datetime,
NumEmployees int
);
insert into tblDailyHours (HourBucket, NumEmployees)
select distinct
date_add(date(t.timeStamp), interval h.Number HOUR) as HourBucket,
0 as NumEmployees
from
tblEmployeeLogging t
CROSS JOIN tblHours h;
Then I update this table to contain all the relevant counts:
update tblDailyHours h
join
(select
h2.HourBucket,
sum(case when el.fromState = 'In' then 1 else -1 end) as cnt
from
tblDailyHours h2
join tblEmployeeLogging el on
h2.HourBucket >= el.timeStamp
group by h2.HourBucket
) cnt ON
h.HourBucket = cnt.HourBucket
set NumEmployees = cnt.cnt;
You can now retrieve the counts with
select *
from tblDailyHours
order by HourBucket;
The counts give the number on site at each of the times displayed, if you want during the hour in question, we'd need to tweak this a little.
There is a working version of this code (using not very realistic data in the logging table) here: rextester.com/DYOR23344
Original Answer (Based on a single over all count)
If you're happy to search over all rows, and want the current "head count" you can use this:
select
sum(case when t.FromState = 'In' then 1 else -1) as Heads
from
MyTable t
But if you know that there will always be no-one there at midnight, you can add a where clause to prevent it looking at more rows than it needs to:
where
date(t.timestamp) = curdate()
Again, on the assumption that the head count reaches zero at midnight, you can generalise that method to get a headcount at any time as follows:
where
date(t.timestamp) = "CENSUS DATE" AND
t.timestamp <= "CENSUS DATETIME"
Obviously you'd need to replace my quoted strings with code which returned the date and datetime of interest. If the headcount doesn't return to zero at midnight, you can achieve the same by removing the first line of the where clause.