Question

I am a New ASP.NET Developer and I am trying to develop a simple suggestion box system. I have the following part of my database desing:

User Table: Username, Name, DivisionCode… etc

Division Table: SapCode, Division

SuggestionLog Table: ID, Title, Description, submittedDate, Username

(The first attribute is the primary key in each table and the attribute (submittedDate) is of DateTime data type)

Now, I need to develop a table that shows suggestions for the last three months. I already developed a query that shows the Employee Name, Username, Division, Suggestion Title, Suggestion Description. All what I want now is to show the Month. For example, to show the suggestions for the last three months, the Month column should show: Jan-2012, Dec-2011, Nov-2011 So how to do that?

My current SQL query:

SELECT     dbo.SafetySuggestionsLog.Title, dbo.SafetySuggestionsLog.Description, dbo.SafetySuggestionsType.Type, dbo.SafetySuggestionsLog.Username, 
                      dbo.employee.Name, dbo.Divisions.DivisionShortcut
FROM         dbo.Divisions INNER JOIN
                      dbo.employee ON dbo.Divisions.SapCode = dbo.employee.DivisionCode INNER JOIN
                      dbo.SafetySuggestionsLog ON dbo.employee.Username = dbo.SafetySuggestionsLog.Username INNER JOIN
                      dbo.SafetySuggestionsType ON dbo.SafetySuggestionsLog.TypeID = dbo.SafetySuggestionsType.ID

The desired output is to display:

Employee Name, Username, Division, SuggestionTitle, SuggstionDescription, SuggestionType Month(submissionDate)

Answer 1

I reformatted you query so it would fit on the page without scrolling.

Hopefully this provides what you need. It uses DATENAME to get the month and year parts from the current date and DATEPART to do the “three months ago” calculation.
Note that DATEPART doesn’t behave as you might expect – it counts the number of period-end boundaries (in this case months) – hence the condition is

...WHERE DATEDIFF(month,SafetySuggestionsLog.submittedDate,getdate()) < 3

because the last three months have two month-end boundaries between them.

I also added an ORDER BY clause.

SELECT     dbo.SafetySuggestionsLog.Title, 
           dbo.SafetySuggestionsLog.Description, 
           dbo.SafetySuggestionsType.Type, 
           dbo.SafetySuggestionsLog.Username, 
           dbo.employee.Name, 
           dbo.Divisions.DivisionShortcut,
           left(datename(month,SafetySuggestionsLog.submittedDate),3) 
            + '-' 
            + datename(year,SafetySuggestionsLog.submittedDate) AS SubmittedMonth
FROM         dbo.Divisions 
INNER JOIN   dbo.employee 
ON dbo.Divisions.SapCode = dbo.employee.DivisionCode 
INNER JOIN   dbo.SafetySuggestionsLog 
ON dbo.employee.Username = dbo.SafetySuggestionsLog.Username 
INNER JOIN   dbo.SafetySuggestionsType 
ON dbo.SafetySuggestionsLog.TypeID = dbo.SafetySuggestionsType.ID
WHERE DATEDIFF(month,SafetySuggestionsLog.submittedDate,getdate()) < 3
ORDER BY SafetySuggestionsLog.submittedDate DESC

It might also be worth noting that you don’t have to fully qualify the name of all the columns in the query – it’s valid SQL to alias the input tables like so:

...INNER JOIN   dbo.SafetySuggestionsLog AS log

You can then refer to column names by alias in the query – e.g.

log.Username

instead of

dbo.SafetySuggestionsLog.Username

which makes it a bit easier to read.