How can I subtract a previous row in sql?

Question

What should I query if I wanted to subtract the current row to the previous row. I will use it on looping in vb6. Something Like this:

Row
1
2
3
4
5
<         


        

Answer 1

Using Cursor:

CREATE TABLE t (id int)
INSERT INTO t
VALUES(1)

INSERT INTO t
VALUES(2)

INSERT INTO t
VALUES(3)

INSERT INTO t
VALUES(4) 

DECLARE @actual int; 
DECLARE @last int;
DECLARE @sub int; 

SET @last = 0; 

DECLARE sub_cursor CURSOR FOR
    SELECT *
    FROM t OPEN sub_cursor 
    FETCH NEXT
    FROM sub_cursor INTO @actual; 

WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0 BEGIN
    SELECT @sub = @actual - @last print cast(@actual AS nvarchar) + '-' + cast(@last AS nvarchar) + '=' + cast(@sub AS nvarchar)
    SET @last = @actual 
    FETCH NEXT FROM sub_cursor INTO @actual; 
END

DROP TABLE t 
CLOSE sub_cursor; DEALLOCATE sub_cursor;

Answer 2

Assuming you have an ordering column -- say id -- then you can do the following in SQL Server 2012:

select col,
       col - coalesce(lag(col) over (order by id), 0) as diff
from t;

In earlier versions of SQL Server, you can do almost the same thing using a correlated subquery:

select col,
       col - isnull((select top 1 col
                     from t t2
                     where t2.id < t.id
                     order by id desc
                    ), 0)
from t

This uses isnull() instead of coalesce() because of a "bug" in SQL Server that evaluates the first argument twice when using coalesce().

You can also do this with row_number():

with cte as (
      select col, row_number() over (order by id) as seqnum
      from t
     )
select t.col, t.col - coalesce(tprev.col, 0) as diff
from cte t left outer join
     cte tprev
     on t.seqnum = tprev.seqnum + 1;

All of these assume that you have some column for specifying the ordering. It might be an id, or a creation date or something else. SQL tables are inherently unordered, so there is no such thing as a "previous row" without a column specifying the ordering.