Looking at user’s first/last transaction details is a common requirement. So given that you have a “user_transaction_details” table which looks something like:
Transaction_id | user_id | transaction_date | purchase amount
How would get first/last transaction details for each user account?
Here’s a design pattern:
[code language=”SQL”]
select AllTransactions.user_id,AllTransactions.purchase_amt from user_transaction_details AllTransactions
inner join
(
select user_id, min(transaction_timestamp) as first_transaction_timestamp from user_transaction_details
group by user_id
) FirstTransaction
on AllTransactions.user_id = FirstTransaction.user_id and AllTransactions.transaction_timestamp = FirstTransaction.first_transaction_timestamp
[/code]
To get the last transaction details for each user account, replace min function with max and that should be it.
Note: Depending on your data model and how you used it in the join, it might be that there would be multiple rows marked as “first/last” transaction and so would want to spend some time figuring out how to deal with these multiple row situation especially if you’re planning to further join this data.
Conclusion:
In this post, I shared a design pattern to write a SQL query to get first/last transaction details for each user account type.
Question for you:
How would you solve this problem? Share you query in the comments section!