SQL to determine minimum sequential days of access?

The following User History table contains one record for every day a given user has accessed a website (in a 24 hour UTC period). It has many thousands of records, but only one record per day per user. If the user has not accessed the website for that day, no record will be generated.

Id      UserId   CreationDate
------  ------   ------------
750997      12   2009-07-07 18:42:20.723
750998      15   2009-07-07 18:42:20.927
751000      19   2009-07-07 18:42:22.283

What I'm looking for is a SQL query on this table with good performance, that tells me which userids have accessed the website for (n) continuous days without missing a day.

In other words, how many users have (n) records in this table with sequential (day-before, or day-after) dates? If any day is missing from the sequence, the sequence is broken and should restart again at 1; we're looking for users who have achieved a continuous number of days here with no gaps.

Any resemblance between this query and a particular Stack Overflow badge is purely coincidental, of course.. :)

How about (and please make sure the previous statement ended with a semi-colon):

WITH numberedrows
     AS (SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY UserID 
                                       ORDER BY CreationDate)
                - DATEDIFF(day,'19000101',CreationDate) AS TheOffset,
                CreationDate,
                UserID
         FROM   tablename)
SELECT MIN(CreationDate),
       MAX(CreationDate),
       COUNT(*) AS NumConsecutiveDays,
       UserID
FROM   numberedrows
GROUP  BY UserID,
          TheOffset  

The idea being that if we have list of the days (as a number), and a row_number, then missed days make the offset between these two lists slightly bigger. So we're looking for a range that has a consistent offset.

You could use "ORDER BY NumConsecutiveDays DESC" at the end of this, or say "HAVING count(*) > 14" for a threshold...

I haven't tested this though - just writing it off the top of my head. Hopefully works in SQL2005 and on.

...and would be very much helped by an index on tablename(UserID, CreationDate)

Edited: Turns out Offset is a reserved word, so I used TheOffset instead.

Edited: The suggestion to use COUNT(*) is very valid - I should've done that in the first place but wasn't really thinking. Previously it was using datediff(day, min(CreationDate), max(CreationDate)) instead.

Rob

The answer is obviously:

SELECT DISTINCT UserId
FROM UserHistory uh1
WHERE (
       SELECT COUNT(*) 
       FROM UserHistory uh2 
       WHERE uh2.CreationDate 
       BETWEEN uh1.CreationDate AND DATEADD(d, @days, uh1.CreationDate)
      ) = @days OR UserId = 52551

EDIT:

Okay here's my serious answer:

DECLARE @days int
DECLARE @seconds bigint
SET @days = 30
SET @seconds = (@days * 24 * 60 * 60) - 1
SELECT DISTINCT UserId
FROM (
    SELECT uh1.UserId, Count(uh1.Id) as Conseq
    FROM UserHistory uh1
    INNER JOIN UserHistory uh2 ON uh2.CreationDate 
        BETWEEN uh1.CreationDate AND 
            DATEADD(s, @seconds, DATEADD(dd, DATEDIFF(dd, 0, uh1.CreationDate), 0))
        AND uh1.UserId = uh2.UserId
    GROUP BY uh1.Id, uh1.UserId
    ) as Tbl
WHERE Conseq >= @days

EDIT:

[Jeff Atwood] This is a great fast solution and deserves to be accepted, but Rob Farley's solution is also excellent and arguably even faster (!). Please check it out too!

If you can change the table schema, I'd suggest adding a column LongestStreak to the table which you'd set to the number of sequential days ending to the CreationDate. It's easy to update the table at login time (similar to what you are doing already, if no rows exist of the current day, you'll check if any row exists for the previous day. If true, you'll increment the LongestStreak in the new row, otherwise, you'll set it to 1.)

The query will be obvious after adding this column:

if exists(select * from table
          where LongestStreak >= 30 and UserId = @UserId)
   -- award the Woot badge.

Some nicely expressive SQL along the lines of:

select
        userId,
    dbo.MaxConsecutiveDates(CreationDate) as blah
from
    dbo.Logins
group by
    userId

Assuming you have a user defined aggregate function something along the lines of (beware this is buggy):

using System;
using System.Data.SqlTypes;
using Microsoft.SqlServer.Server;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

namespace SqlServerProject1
{
    [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)]
    [Serializable]
    internal struct MaxConsecutiveState
    {
        public int CurrentSequentialDays;
        public int MaxSequentialDays;
        public SqlDateTime LastDate;
    }

    [Serializable]
    [SqlUserDefinedAggregate(
        Format.Native,
        IsInvariantToNulls = true, //optimizer property
        IsInvariantToDuplicates = false, //optimizer property
        IsInvariantToOrder = false) //optimizer property
    ]
    [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)]
    public class MaxConsecutiveDates
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// The variable that holds the intermediate result of the concatenation
        /// </summary>
        private MaxConsecutiveState _intermediateResult;

        /// <summary>
        /// Initialize the internal data structures
        /// </summary>
        public void Init()
        {
            _intermediateResult = new MaxConsecutiveState { LastDate = SqlDateTime.MinValue, CurrentSequentialDays = 0, MaxSequentialDays = 0 };
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Accumulate the next value, not if the value is null
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="value"></param>
        public void Accumulate(SqlDateTime value)
        {
            if (value.IsNull)
            {
                return;
            }
            int sequentialDays = _intermediateResult.CurrentSequentialDays;
            int maxSequentialDays = _intermediateResult.MaxSequentialDays;
            DateTime currentDate = value.Value.Date;
            if (currentDate.AddDays(-1).Equals(new DateTime(_intermediateResult.LastDate.TimeTicks)))
                sequentialDays++;
            else
            {
                maxSequentialDays = Math.Max(sequentialDays, maxSequentialDays);
                sequentialDays = 1;
            }
            _intermediateResult = new MaxConsecutiveState
                                      {
                                          CurrentSequentialDays = sequentialDays,
                                          LastDate = currentDate,
                                          MaxSequentialDays = maxSequentialDays
                                      };
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Merge the partially computed aggregate with this aggregate.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="other"></param>
        public void Merge(MaxConsecutiveDates other)
        {
            // add stuff for two separate calculations
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Called at the end of aggregation, to return the results of the aggregation.
        /// </summary>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public SqlInt32 Terminate()
        {
            int max = Math.Max((int) ((sbyte) _intermediateResult.CurrentSequentialDays), (sbyte) _intermediateResult.MaxSequentialDays);
            return new SqlInt32(max);
        }
    }
}

Seems like you could take advantage of the fact that to be continuous over n days would require there to be n rows.

So something like:

SELECT users.UserId, count(1) as cnt
FROM users
WHERE users.CreationDate > now() - INTERVAL 30 DAY
GROUP BY UserId
HAVING cnt = 30