Select all dates which are not in one of the date ranges

Question

I have a table of time periods. (date ranges). These date ranges can overlap. These date ranges can also be subranges of another data record.

+----+------------+------------+
| id | start_date | end_date   |
+----+------------+------------+
|  1 | 2019-01-01 | 2019-01-31 |
|  2 | 2019-02-01 | 2010-02-28 |
|  3 | 2019-04-01 | 2010-04-30 |
+----+------------+------------+

Then I have a table with invoices with invoice date and invoice number:

+----+--------------+------------+
| id | invoice_date | invoice_no |
+----+--------------+------------+
|  1 | 2019-01-14   | 4534534BG  |
|  2 | 2019-03-01   | 678678AAA  |
|  3 | 2019-04-13   | 123123DDD  |
+----+--------------+------------+

I'm looking for all invoices that are available in one date period.

The goal in this small example would be to find the invoice from March: invoice_no: 678678AAA

---

My Approach

SELECT *
FROM `invoice`
WHERE (invoice_date BETWEEN '2019-01-01' AND '2019-01-31')

With this solution I would have to mark the found invoices (which provide a result) as "found" and then repeat the query for all other ranges. (Until no open invoices or periods are processed). That would be a lot of queries, because there are a lot of invoices and a lot of time periods. I would like to avoid that.

Is there a trick here how to get the start and end date into the BETWEEN via Select?

Answer 1

To exhibit invoices that do not belong to any of the date ranges defined in the other table, you could use a not exists condition:

select i.*
from invoices i
where not exists (
    select 1
    from periods p
    where i.invoice_date >= p.start_date and i.invoice_date <= p.end_date
)

Another typical solution is to use a left join antipattern, ie:

select i.*
from invoices i
left join periods p 
    on i.invoice_date >= p.start_date and i.invoice_date <= p.end_date
where p.id is null