I'm a bit of a newby at SQL and I don't really understand what to do here, so any help is really appreciated. I have a table full of readings from different readers, there's like 500.000 of them, so I can't do this by hand.
I received the table without the difference in it. I managed to calculate it, but there's a bit of a problem there...
It looks a bit like this:
reader_id | date | reading | difference
1 | 01-01-2013 | 205 | 0
1 | 02-01-2013 | 210 | 5
1 | 03-01-2013 | 213 | 3
... | ... | ... | ...
1 | 31-12-2013 | 2451 | 4
2 | 01-01-2013 | 8543 | 6092
2 | 02-01-2013 | 8548 | 5
reader_id and date form the primary key. The combination is unique.
How can I make sure I don't get the difference calculated when the last column contained a different reader_id?
When querying my data with a query like this one, the data get skewed by the incorrect difference between the two reader_ids:
SELECT AVG(difference), reader_id FROM table GROUP BY reader_id
For
I just want to get the average difference for each reader.
your query is perfectly good. I think you got something wrong in your difference calculation. The first value for reader_id=2, 6092, is the difference of the last reading from reader1 and the first reading from reader 2, i don't think that makes sense. If i'm not mistaken, the difference value is the current day reading - previous day reading. Therefore you should set the difference value of the first reading of each reader to 0.
You can do this with the following query:
UPDATE table t INNER JOIN (SELECT reader_id, min(date) as first_day FROM table GROUP BY reader_id) as tmp ON tmp.reader_id=t.reader_id AND tmp.first_day=t.date SET t.difference=0
Then
SELECT AVG(difference), reader_id FROM table GROUP BY reader_id
will do what you expect.