report need - open issues by day

we need the capability to see the number of issues in a given (or multiple given) status by day(/week) for a date range (required) and any optional search criteria (i.e. component/release) etc.

this would be used to allow us to "see the curve" to make sure as we near a release that the number of open issues is actually decreasing by day.

ultimately we'd like to see both a table and a chart, but just the table will give us enough to have Excel generate the chart.

the reason I request this as a separate report in JIRA is that its not terribly easy to create this as a SQL report. the easiest (not necessarily the most efficent) way to generate it is to select all matching issues and then for each date in the range walk through the list and count. maybe there's a quick/easy way with SQL that I'm missing...