Does anybode know a good (efficient) algorithm for the following?
Imagine that I have a lot of entries of the form (sorry if the SQL is
messed up):
CREATE TABLE "pets" (
name VARCHAR(20);
"born" timestamp;
"died" timestamp;
);
and I have a LOT of pets (let's say millions) and some don't live too
long (mice, fruitflies, whatever), and some do (parrots, elephants).
I would like to make a query to say
on july 4 of last year, what pets were alive?
and I would like to make this query right to the minute
on july 4 of last year at 7:01 PM what pets were alive?
I can't figure out how to index or query this in a manner that isn't
going to devolve into a linear search, which would be too slow.
Anybody run into this problem before? Is there a known algorithm to
solve it? Can I twist the geographic data and algorithms around to
support this?
Thanks,
Mike H.
