I'm trying to figure out a way of identifying a "run" of results (successive rows, in order) that meet some condition. Currently, I'm ordering a result set, and scanning by eye for particular patterns. Here's an example:
SELECT the_date, name
FROM orders
WHERE
the_date BETWEEN
to_date('2013-09-18',..) AND
to_date('2013-09-22', ..)
ORDER BY the_date
--------------------------------------
the_date | name
--------------------------------------
2013-09-18 00:00:01 | John
--------------------------------------
2013-09-19 00:00:01 | James
--------------------------------------
2013-09-20 00:00:01 | John
--------------------------------------
2013-09-20 00:00:02 | John
--------------------------------------
2013-09-20 00:00:03 | John
--------------------------------------
2013-09-20 00:00:04 | John
--------------------------------------
2013-09-21 16:00:01 | Jennifer
--------------------------------------
What I want to extract from this result set is all the rows attributed to John
on 2013-09-20
. Generally what I'm looking for is a run of results from the same name
, in a row, >= 3. I'm using Oracle 11, but I'm interested to know if this can be achieved with strict SQL, or if some kind of analytical function must be used.