Question

How do you most easily calculate how many e.g. Mondays are left in a month using MySQL (counting today)?

Bonus points for a solution that solves it for all days of the week in one query.

Desired output (run on Tuesday August 17th 2010):

dayOfWeek   left
1           2      -- Sunday
2           2      -- Monday
3           3      -- Tuesday (yep, including today)
4           2      -- Wednesday
5           2      -- Thursday
6           2      -- Friday
7           2      -- Saturday

Answer 1

Create a date table that contains one row for each day that you care about (say Jan 1 2000 – Dec 31 2099):

create table dates (the_date date primary key);

delimiter $$

create procedure populate_dates (p_start_date date, p_end_date date)
begin
declare v_date date;
set v_date = p_start_date;
while v_date <= p_end_date
do
  insert ignore into dates (the_date) values (v_date);
  set v_Date = date_add(v_date, interval 1 day);
end while;
end $$

delimiter ;

call populate_dates('2000-01-01','2099-12-31');

Then you can run a query like this to get your desired output:

set @date = curdate();

select dayofweek(the_date) as dayOfWeek, count(*) as numLeft 
from dates 
where the_date >= @date
and the_date <  str_to_date(period_add(date_format(@date,'%Y%m'),1),'%Y%m') 
group by dayofweek(the_date);

That will exclude days of the week that have 0 occurrences left in the month. If you want to see those you can create another table with the days of the week (1-7):

create table days_of_week (
  id tinyint unsigned not null primary key, 
  name char(10) not null
);

insert into days_of_week (id,name) values (1,'Sunday'),(2,'Monday'),
  (3,'Tuesday'),(4,'Wednesday'),(5,'Thursday'),(6,'Friday'),(7,'Saturday');

And query that table with a left join to the dates table:

select w.id, count(d.the_Date) as numLeft 
from days_of_week w 
left outer join dates d on w.id = dayofweek(d.the_date) 
  and d.the_date >= @date 
  and d.the_date <  str_to_date(period_add(date_format(@date,'%Y%m'),1),'%Y%m') 
group by w.id;