Question

I am trying to create a table with the third Friday of the month for each month in the past year. I know how to do this for one month at a time but am having trouble in returning a range of dates instead. I have tried to do this using a for loop:

create table fridays as
begin
 for i in 1..365
   loop
     select next_day(trunc(sysdate - i,'MM')+13,'FRIDAY') third_friday 
  from dual
end loop;

Do I need to have an array to put these values into or am I going wrong somewhere else?

Answer 1

Do you mean something like this?

select dt
  from (select dt,
               row_number() over(partition by to_char(dt, 'mm') order by dt) wn
          from (select trunc(sysdate, 'mm') - level dt
                  from dual
                connect by level < 365)
         where to_char(dt, 'd') = 6)
 where wn = 3

Here is a sqlfiddle demo

---

UPDATE In reference to @APC’s comment:

If you don’t want to rely on NLS_TERRITORY then you can do something like this:

select dt
  from (select dt,
               row_number() over(partition by to_char(dt, 'mm') order by dt) wn
          from (select trunc(sysdate, 'mm') - level dt
                  from dual
                connect by level < 365)
         where to_char(dt, 'dy', 'nls_date_language=AMERICAN') = 'fri')
 where wn = 3