Question

By ‘fixed vector’ I mean a static list of values, like 1 through 24.

The current query looks like this (simplified)

SELECT Period, Profit FROM Projections 

But the data is ‘sparse’ — so there’s not a row for every period.

What query will give me a row for peiods 1-24 every time, with zeros (or NULLs) where there’s no data?

I would like to do this with just the query to avoid a mess of client code.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You could make a udf called udfRange(start int,count int) or something like that, and left-join to the output of the function.

Or for something really quick and dirty, you could join to a subselect that looked like

SELECT DATA.Period, P.Profit FROM ( SELECT 1 AS Period UNION SELECT 2 ... UNION SELECT 24) AS DATA  LEFT JOIN Projections P ON DATA.Period = P.Period