Re: How to select by proximity

On 05/15/2012 04:30 AM, Francisco Leovey wrote:
> Can OFFSET be a negative number?
> What I was looking for is a way to access the +1 and -1 record with
> SQL as seen on the screen when you do a select using an index or a sort.
> With PgAdmin when you see a record of interest in the middle of the
> display, you can visually see the one above and below.
> I seem to remember that in Informix I had a go + or - inside a
> pointer loop.
>
Depending on your use-case you might be able to select the current and
surrounding records like this:

with prev as (select * from yourtable where yourcolumn <= 'Marriot'
order by yourcolumn desc limit 6),
next as (select * from yourtable where yourcolumn > 'Marriot' order
by yourcolumn limit 5),
select * from prev
union
select * from next
order by yourcolumn
;

But if "yourcolumn" is not unique, your results may be unpredictable.

Cheers,
Steve