Aggregate Overlapping Segments to Measure Effective Length

Question

I have a road_events table:

create table road_events (
    event_id number(4,0),
    road_id number(4,0),
    year number(4,0),
    from_meas number         


        

Answer 1

This finds expands the table to produce a row for each mile of each road, and simply takes the MAX year. We can just then COUNT the number of rows to produce the event_length.

It produces the table exactly as you specified above.

Note: I ran this query against SQL Server. You could use LEAST instead of SELECT MIN(event_length) FROM (VALUES...) in Oracle I think.

WITH NumberRange(result) AS 
(
    SELECT 0
    UNION ALL
    SELECT result + 1
    FROM   NumberRange 
    WHERE  result < 301 --Max length of any road
),
CurrentRoadEventLength(road_id, [year], event_length) AS
(
    SELECT road_id, [year], COUNT(*) AS event_length
    FROM   (
            SELECT re.road_id, n.result, MAX(re.[year]) as [year]
            FROM   road_events re INNER JOIN NumberRange n 
                   ON (    re.from_meas <= n.result 
                       AND re.to_meas > n.result
                      )
            GROUP BY re.road_id, n.result
           ) events_per_mile
    GROUP BY road_id, [year]
)
SELECT re.event_id, re.road_id, re.[year], re.total_road_length, 
       (SELECT MIN(event_length) FROM (VALUES (re.to_meas - re.from_meas), (cre.event_length)) AS EventLengths(event_length))
FROM   road_events re INNER JOIN CurrentRoadEventLength cre
       ON (    re.road_id = cre.road_id
           AND re.[year] = cre.[year]
          )
ORDER BY re.event_id, re.road_id
OPTION (MAXRECURSION 301) --Max length of any road