How to form a dynamic pivot table or return multiple values from GROUP BY subquery - postgresql

Question

I'm having some major issues with the following query formation:
I have projects with start and end dates
Name Start End
---------------------------------------
Project 1 2020-08-01 2020-09-10
Project 2 2020-01-01 2025-01-01
and I'm trying to count the monthly working days within each project with the following subquery
select datetrunc('month', days) as d_month, count(days) as d_count
from generate_series(greatest('2020-08-01'::date, p.start), least('2020-09-14'::date, p.end), '1 day'::interval) days
where extract(DOW from days) not IN (0, 6)
group by d_month
where p.start is from the aliased main query and the dates are hard-coded for now, this correctly gives me the following result:
{"d_month"=>2020-08-01 00:00:00 +0000, "d_count"=>21}
{"d_month"=>2020-09-01 00:00:00 +0000, "d_count"=>10}
However subqueries can't return multiple values. The date range for the query is dynamic, so I would either need to somehow return the query as:
Name Start End 2020-08-01 2020-09-01 ...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Project 1 2020-08-01 2020-09-10 21 8
Project 2 2020-01-01 2025-01-01 21 10
Or simply return the whole subquery as JSON, but it doesn't seem to working either.
Any idea on how to achieve this or whether there are simpler solutions for this?

Answer 1

The most correct solution would be to create an actual calendar table that holds every possible day of interest to your business and, at a minimum for your purpose here, marks work days.
Ideally you would have columns to hold fiscal quarters, periods, and weeks to match your industry. You would also mark holidays. Joining to this table makes these kinds of calculations a snap.
create table calendar (
ddate date not null primary key,
is_work_day boolean default true
);
insert into calendar
select ts::date as ddate,
extract(dow from ts) not in (0,6) as is_work_day
from generate_series(
'2000-01-01'::timestamp,
'2099-12-31'::timestamp,
interval '1 day'
) as gs(ts);
Assuming a calendar table is not within scope, you can do this:
with bounds as (
select min(start) as first_start, max("end") as last_end
from my_projects
), cal as (
select ts::date as ddate,
extract(dow from ts) not in (0,6) as is_work_day
from bounds
cross join generate_series(
first_start,
last_end,
interval '1 day'
) as gs(ts)
), bymonth as (
select p.name, p.start, p.end,
date_trunc('month', c.ddate) as month_start,
count(*) as work_days
from my_projects p
join cal c on c.ddate between p.start and p.end
where c.is_work_day
group by p.name, p.start, p.end, month_start
)
select jsonb_object_agg(to_char(month_start, 'YYYY-MM-DD'), work_days)
|| jsonb_object_agg('name', name)
|| jsonb_object_agg('start', start)
|| jsonb_object_agg('end', "end") as result
from bymonth
group by name;
Doing a pivot from rows to columns in SQL is usually a bad idea, so the query produces json for you.