MySQL how to fill missing dates in range?

Question

I have a table with 2 columns, date and score. It has at most 30 entries, for each of the last 30 days one.

date      score
-----------------
1.8.2010  19
2         


        

Answer 1

I'm not a fan of the other answers, requiring tables to be created and such. This query does it efficiently without helper tables.

SELECT 
    IF(score IS NULL, 0, score) AS score,
    b.Days AS date
FROM 
    (SELECT a.Days 
    FROM (
        SELECT curdate() - INTERVAL (a.a + (10 * b.a) + (100 * c.a)) DAY AS Days
        FROM       (SELECT 0 AS a UNION ALL SELECT 1 UNION ALL SELECT 2 UNION ALL SELECT 3 UNION ALL SELECT 4 UNION ALL SELECT 5 UNION ALL SELECT 6 UNION ALL SELECT 7 UNION ALL SELECT 8 UNION ALL SELECT 9) AS a
        CROSS JOIN (SELECT 0 AS a UNION ALL SELECT 1 UNION ALL SELECT 2 UNION ALL SELECT 3 UNION ALL SELECT 4 UNION ALL SELECT 5 UNION ALL SELECT 6 UNION ALL SELECT 7 UNION ALL SELECT 8 UNION ALL SELECT 9) AS b
        CROSS JOIN (SELECT 0 AS a UNION ALL SELECT 1 UNION ALL SELECT 2 UNION ALL SELECT 3 UNION ALL SELECT 4 UNION ALL SELECT 5 UNION ALL SELECT 6 UNION ALL SELECT 7 UNION ALL SELECT 8 UNION ALL SELECT 9) AS c
    ) a
    WHERE a.Days >= curdate() - INTERVAL 30 DAY) b
LEFT JOIN your_table
    ON date = b.Days
ORDER BY b.Days;

So lets dissect this.

SELECT 
    IF(score IS NULL, 0, score) AS score,
    b.Days AS date

The if will detect days that had no score and set them to 0. b.Days is the configured amount of days you chose to get from the current date, up to 1000.

    (SELECT a.Days 
    FROM (
        SELECT curdate() - INTERVAL (a.a + (10 * b.a) + (100 * c.a)) DAY AS Days
        FROM       (SELECT 0 AS a UNION ALL SELECT 1 UNION ALL SELECT 2 UNION ALL SELECT 3 UNION ALL SELECT 4 UNION ALL SELECT 5 UNION ALL SELECT 6 UNION ALL SELECT 7 UNION ALL SELECT 8 UNION ALL SELECT 9) AS a
        CROSS JOIN (SELECT 0 AS a UNION ALL SELECT 1 UNION ALL SELECT 2 UNION ALL SELECT 3 UNION ALL SELECT 4 UNION ALL SELECT 5 UNION ALL SELECT 6 UNION ALL SELECT 7 UNION ALL SELECT 8 UNION ALL SELECT 9) AS b
        CROSS JOIN (SELECT 0 AS a UNION ALL SELECT 1 UNION ALL SELECT 2 UNION ALL SELECT 3 UNION ALL SELECT 4 UNION ALL SELECT 5 UNION ALL SELECT 6 UNION ALL SELECT 7 UNION ALL SELECT 8 UNION ALL SELECT 9) AS c
    ) a
    WHERE a.Days >= curdate() - INTERVAL 30 DAY) b

This subquery is something I saw on stackoverflow. It efficiently generates a list of the past 1000 days from the current date. The interval (currently 30) in the WHERE clause at the end determines which days are returned; the maximum is 1000. This query could be easily modified to return 100s of years worth of dates, but 1000 should be good for most things.

LEFT JOIN your_table
    ON date = b.Days
ORDER BY b.Days;

This is the part that brings your table that contains the score into it. You compare to the selected date range from the date generator query to be able to fill in 0s where needed (the score will be set to NULL initially, because it is a LEFT JOIN; this is fixed in the select statement). I also order it by the dates, just because. This is preference, you could also order by score.

Before the ORDER BY you could easily join with your table about user info you mentioned with your edit, to add that last requirement.

I hope this version of the query helps someone. Thanks for reading.