Hell0,

I have a need to get the average values of a field within user defined time intervals, between user defined datetime's.

Ex.

I need the average of the temperature from 11-20-2011 01:00:00(startDate) to 11-22-2011 1:00:00(endDate), in 2 hour intervals.

So the query would be averaging for 2 hours, then the next 2 hours until it reaches the endDate.

So far I have figured out the problem using php and while loops but I would rather execute this with one query rather than potentially querying the database 1000 times.

So far:

SELECT date_time, AVG(input_calibrated)
FROM inputs
WHERE
(date_time BETWEEN $startDate and $endDate)
AND
(chan_id = $chan_id)

I guess what I really need is a way to get some sort of while loop within the query to run changing the the BETWEEN dates until the endDate is reached.

And direction would be appreciated.

Thank you

Id have a look at the GROUP BY sub clause, along with the MySQL date time functions
rather than do this as a series of selects within a loop

You need to look at this problem slightly differently. For example, the periods that you are looking for are as follows:

11-20-2011 01:00:00 until 11-22-2011 1:00:00 in two hour intervals

If you convert the date to the format YYYYMMDD and the time to simply the hour HH then we can do something

SELECT Date_format(date_time, '%Y%m%d'),
Floor(( Date_format('%H') - 1 ) / 2),
Avg(input_calibrated)
FROM inputs
WHERE ( date_time BETWEEN $startdate AND $enddate )
AND ( chan_id = $chan_id )
GROUP BY Date_format(date_time, '%Y%m%d'),
Floor(( Date_format('%H') - 1 ) / 2);

Basically we subtract 1 from the hour and then divide by 2. So 01:00 will return FLOOR((1-1)/2) or 0, 02:00 will return FLOOR((2-1)/2) or 0, 03:00 will return 1 and so on. As we are grouping by the date and the interval you will have all the results returned for every two hour period between the intervals selected.