Oracle - help making a query

Question

I have source of data in the following format:

Event Type| Date
1         | 2011-07-14 09:00
1         | 2011-07-14 09:01
1         | 2011-07-14 09:02
2         | 2011-07-14 09:30
2         | 2011-07-14 09:31
1         | 2011-07-14 10:00
1         | 2011-07-14 10:01

Event types are sorted by date, as they occurred. I need to make a query which will show the date ranges when events were used, sorted by date. Like this:

Event Type | Date Range
1          | 2011-07-14 09:00 - 2011-07-14 09:02
2          | 2011-07-14 09:30 - 2011-07-14 09:31
1          | 2011-07-14 10:00 - 2011-07-14 10:01

Do you have any hints? I reckon this will probably need to be done with analytic functions, but I haven't been able to come up with a decent solution yet.

Answer 1

You could also try the following approach:

WITH ranked AS (
  SELECT
    EventType,
    Date,
    ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY Date) -
      ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY EventType ORDER BY Date) AS GroupID
  FROM Events
)
SELECT
  EventType,
  MIN(Date) AS StartDate,
  MAX(Date) AS EndDate
FROM ranked
GROUP BY
  GroupID,
  EventType
ORDER BY
  MIN(Date)