Last values for telemetry

September 26, 2022

I have a table with telemetry and timestamps from a couple of devices (aka time series table) in PostgreSQL. (The table holds about 1M records.) I want to select the latest value of any parameter for any sensor (location_id) with a single query.

My sample schema and data:

CREATE TABLE telemetry (
    location_id VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
    param VARCHAR(32) NOT NULL,
    value NUMERIC NOT NULL,
    timestamp TIMESTAMP NOT NULL DEFAULT NOW()
);

INSERT INTO telemetry (location_id, param, value, timestamp) VALUES
('001', 'temperature', 0, '2003-04-12 04:05:06'),
('001', 'humidity', 12, '2003-04-12 04:05:06'),
('002', 'temperature', 10, '2003-04-12 04:05:06'),
('002', 'humidity', 13, '2003-04-12 04:05:06'),

('001', 'temperature', 20, '2003-04-12 04:05:08'),
('001', 'humidity', 14, '2003-04-12 04:05:08'),
('002', 'temperature', 30, '2003-04-12 04:05:08')

My expected output:

location_id | temperature | humidity
001         | 20          | 14
002         | 30          | 13

I’ve played a lot with SELECT DISTINCT ON, but after all I’m not sure if it’s even possible.

>Solution :

Determine the latest values first using ROW_NUMBER combined by PARTITION BY and ORDER BY, use it to filter and then pivot the data:

WITH latest_values AS (
  SELECT 
    *,
    ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION by location_id, param ORDER BY timestamp DESC) row_num
FROM telemetry)
  
SELECT 
  location_id, 
  MAX(CASE WHEN param = 'temperature' THEN value END) AS temperature, 
  MAX(CASE WHEN param = 'humidity' THEN value END) AS humidity
FROM latest_values
WHERE row_num = 1
GROUP BY location_id

dbfiddle