Some IT organizations that I visit have a sign somewhere indicating the number of days that have passed without a major issue. Production sites with proper respect for health and safety to something similar with signs like this one:

In this article, I am wondering about two things:

  • given a list of all incidents, can I easily derive the longest streak of days without accident
  • and the reverse: given a list of events, can I easily find the longest consecutive string of days on which that particular type of event happened (this time not accidents but more positive things like ‘the boss giving a compliment’, ‘an inspection passed’ , ‘a shiny new blog article published’, ‘my neighbour not drinking an alcoholic beverage’ or ‘my son getting up on time’

Using Analytical Functions, it should be fairly easy to find out both things, I suspect – although it turns out that the first is a little more straightforward.

(more…)