How to Use BETWEEN Correctly in PostgreSQL

Be careful when using BETWEEN with timestamps. You might end up chopping off a whole day of data 😬

Imagine you were chief safety inspector at a local trampoline park (bonus points if that is your job in real life). You might write a query like this to get a report of accidents in December:

SELECT *
FROM accidents
WHERE created_at BETWEEN '2019-12-01' AND '2019-12-31'

Looks good, right? Nope.

This query would omit any mishaps the whole day of December 31. Why? Your query only looks from midnight on Dec 1 to midnight on Dec 31. Any bump, abrasion, or mid-air collision that occurred after midnight on the 31st won't be in your results. The query above is the same as:

SELECT *
FROM accidents
WHERE created_at >= '2019-12-01 00:00:00.000000'
AND created_at <= '2019-12-31 00:00:00.000000'

You can avoid this problem by writing the query:

SELECT *
FROM accidents
WHERE created_at >= '2019-12-01'
AND created_at < '2020-01-01'

The lesson: save BETWEEN for discrete quantities like integers. And stay away from trampoline parks. We’ve seen the data and it doesn't look pretty.