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Wow, I was just trying to solve the problem of merging overlapping periods in ruby. Life would be so much easier if the database did it for me!

Sort by lowest start, merge left when they overlap. Emit current span if not. Repeat.

If you want to do this with a data structure instead of a database then discrete interval encoding trees solve this problem well. https://xlinux.nist.gov/dads/HTML/discretintrv.html