SQL to determine minimum sequential days of access?

Question

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 r

Answer 1

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