Monthly retention in Amazon redshift - postgresql

Question

I'm trying to calculate monthly retention rate in Amazon Redshift and have come up with the following query:
Query 1
SELECT EXTRACT(year FROM activity.created_at) AS Year,
EXTRACT(month FROM activity.created_at) AS Month,
COUNT(DISTINCT activity.member_id) AS active_users,
COUNT(DISTINCT future_activity.member_id) AS retained_users,
COUNT(DISTINCT future_activity.member_id) / COUNT(DISTINCT activity.member_id)::float AS retention
FROM ads.fbs_page_view_staging activity
LEFT JOIN ads.fbs_page_view_staging AS future_activity
ON activity.mongo_id = future_activity.mongo_id
AND datediff ('month',activity.created_at,future_activity.created_at) = 1
GROUP BY Year,
Month
ORDER BY Year,
Month
For some reason this query returns zero retained_users and zero retention. I'd appreciate any help regarding why this may be happening or maybe a completely different query for monthly retention would work.
I modified the query as per another SO post and here it goes:
Query 2
WITH t AS (
SELECT member_id
,date_trunc('month', created_at) AS month
,count(*) AS item_transactions
,lag(date_trunc('month', created_at)) OVER (PARTITION BY member_id
ORDER BY date_trunc('month', created_at))
= date_trunc('month', created_at) - interval '1 month'
OR NULL AS repeat_transaction
FROM ads.fbs_page_view_staging
WHERE created_at >= '2016-01-01'::date
AND created_at < '2016-04-01'::date -- time range of interest.
GROUP BY 1, 2
)
SELECT month
,sum(item_transactions) AS num_trans
,count(*) AS num_buyers
,count(repeat_transaction) AS repeat_buyers
,round(
CASE WHEN sum(item_transactions) > 0
THEN count(repeat_transaction) / sum(item_transactions) * 100
ELSE 0
END, 2) AS buyer_retention
FROM t
GROUP BY 1
ORDER BY 1;
This query gives me the following error:
An error occurred when executing the SQL command:
WITH t AS (
SELECT member_id
,date_trunc('month', created_at) AS month
,count(*) AS item_transactions
,lag(date_trunc('m...
[Amazon](500310) Invalid operation: Interval values with month or year parts are not supported
Details:
-----------------------------------------------
error: Interval values with month or year parts are not supported
code: 8001
context: interval months: "1"
query: 616822
location: cg_constmanager.cpp:145
process: padbmaster [pid=15116]
-----------------------------------------------;
I have a feeling that Query 2 would fare better than Query 1, so I'd prefer to fix the error on that.
Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Query 1 looks good. I tried similar one. See below. You are using self join on table (ads.fbs_page_view_staging) and the same column (created_at). Assuming mongo_id is unique, the datediff('month'....) will always return 0 and datediff ('month',activity.created_at,future_activity.created_at) = 1 will always be false.
-- Count distinct events of join_col_id that have lapsed for one month.
SELECT count(distinct E.join_col_id) dist_ct
FROM public.fact_events E
JOIN public.dim_table Z
ON E.join_col_id = Z.join_col_id
WHERE datediff('month', event_time, sysdate) = 1;
-- 2771654 -- dist_ct