I have a table tab that has cols date,sym,value and is sorted from oldest date to the recent.
I am trying to select the past N records for each sym and am not sure of the query for this. I know that I can select based on date being within a range but I needed it based on sym irrespective if value appeared on consecutive dates or not.
You could do this with fby and the virtual row number column i:
https://code.kx.com/q/ref/fby/
q){ select from tab where ({y in x#y}[x];i) fby sym }[-2]
date sym time src price size
------------------------------------------------------------
2014.04.21 AAPL 2014.04.21D16:29:03.253000000 N 24.98 3561
2014.04.21 AAPL 2014.04.21D16:29:03.558000000 N 24.98 2733
2014.04.21 CSCO 2014.04.21D16:28:56.265000000 O 35.6 8390
2014.04.21 CSCO 2014.04.21D16:29:44.572000000 L 35.61 2286
2014.04.21 DELL 2014.04.21D16:29:35.374000000 L 29.57 1444
2014.04.21 DELL 2014.04.21D16:29:39.979000000 N 29.56 216
2014.04.21 GOOG 2014.04.21D16:29:50.569000000 N 41.87 722
2014.04.21 GOOG 2014.04.21D16:29:58.633000000 O 41.9 437
Edit: Faster way would be to use functional exec with the 5th argument n(number of records) for each sym.
raze{
//[table;where;by;cols;rows]
?[tab;enlist (in;`sym;enlist x);0b;();y]
}[;-2]'[distinct tab[`sym]]