Re: summing tables

Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu>

From: Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu>
To: "Viorel Dragomir" <bigchief@vio.ro>
Cc: <pgsql-sql@postgresql.org>
Date: 2003-07-15T14:55:38Z
Lists: pgsql-sql
To solve this problem efficiently you probably need the lead/lag analytic
functions. Unfortunately Postgres doesn't have them.

You could do it with something like:

update foo set c = a+b+(select c from foo as x where seq < foo.seq ORDER BY seq desc LIMIT 1) 

or the more standard but likely to be way slower:

update foo set c = a+b+(select c from foo as x where seq = (select max(seq) from foo as y where seq < foo.seq))


However, i would suggest that if you have an implicit relationship between
records you should make that relationship explicit with a foreign key. If you
had a column that contained the seq of the parent record then this would be
easy. I'm really puzzled how this query as currently specified could be
useful.


-- 
greg