Grouping items that were created within a certain time of each other

I have a bunch of products (500k or so) in a database that were created over the last several years and I'd like to group them together (Rails 2.3.14)

Ideally, they would be considered the same group if:

1. They were created by the same company_id
2. They were created within 10 minutes of each other

A rough pass at what I'm trying to accomplish:

def self.package_products
  Company.each do |开发者_JAVA技巧company|
   package = Package.new
   products = Product.find(:all, :conditions => [:company_id = company && created_around_similar_times])
   package.contents = first_few_product_descriptions
   package.save!
   products.update_all(:package_id => package.id)
 end
end

To me it smells bad though. I don't like looping through the companies and can't help but think there's a better way to do it. Does anyone have any sql-fu that can group similar items? Basically looking to find products from the same company that were created within 10 minutes of each other and assign them the same package_id.

This is hard to to in pure SQL. I would resort to a plpgsql procedure.
Say, your table looks like this:
_{(Next time, be so nice as to post a table definition. Worth more than a thousand words.)}

create table p (
  id serial primary key     -- or whatever your primary key is!
, company_id int4 NOT NULL
, create_time timestamp NOT NULL
, for_sale bool NOT NULL
);

Use a plpgsql function like this:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION f_p_group()
  RETURNS void AS
$BODY$
DECLARE
    g_id             integer := 1;
    last_time        timestamp;
    last_company_id  integer;
    r                p%ROWTYPE;
BEGIN

-- If the table is huge, special settings for these parameters will help
SET temp_buffers = '100MB';   -- more RAM for temp table, adjust to actual size of p
SET work_mem = '100MB';       -- more RAM for sorting

-- create temp table just like original.
CREATE TEMP TABLE tmp_p ON COMMIT DROP AS
SELECT * FROM p LIMIT 0;      -- no rows yet

-- add group_id.
ALTER TABLE tmp_p ADD column group_id integer;

-- loop through table, write row + group_id to temp table
FOR r IN
    SELECT *                  -- get the whole row!
      FROM p
--   WHERE for_sale       -- commented out, after it vanished from the question
     ORDER BY company_id, create_time -- group by company_id first, there could be several groups intertwined

LOOP
    IF r.company_id <> last_company_id OR (r.create_time - last_time) > interval '10 min' THEN
        g_id := g_id + 1;
    END IF;

    INSERT INTO tmp_p SELECT r.*, g_id;

    last_time       := r.create_time;
    last_company_id := r.company_id;
END LOOP;

TRUNCATE p;
ALTER TABLE p ADD column group_id integer; -- add group_id now

INSERT INTO p
SELECT * FROM tmp_p;          -- ORDER BY something?

ANALYZE p;                    -- table has been rewritten, no VACUUM is needed.

END;
$BODY$
  LANGUAGE plpgsql;

Call once, then discard:

SELECT f_p_group();

DROP FUNCTION f_p_group();

Now, all members of a group as per your definition share a group_id.

Edit after question edit

I put in a couple more things:

• Read the table into a temporary table (ordering in the process), do all the updates there, truncate the original table add group_id and write updated rows from the temp table in one go. Should be much faster and no vacuum needed afterwards. But you need some RAM for that
• for_sale ignored in query after it's not in the question any more.
• Read about %ROWTYPE.
• Read here about work_mem and temp_buffers.
• TRUNCATE, ANALYZE, TEMP TABLE, ALTER TABLE, ... all in the fine manual
• I tested it with pg 9.0. should work in 8.4 - 9.0 and probably older versions too.