Question

I need to create a stored procedure that upon exceution checks if any new rows have been added to a table within the past 12 hours. If not, an warning email must be sent to a recipient.

I have the procedures for sending the email, but the problem is the query itself. I imagine I’d have to make an sql command that uses current date and compares that to the dates in the rows. But I’m a complete beginner in SQL so I can’t even use the right words to find anything on google.

Short version:

Using MS SQL Server 2005, how can I check against the dates, then return a result based on whether new rows were created within the last 12 hours, and use that result to decide whether or not to send email?

Answer 1

Say your date field in the table is ‘CreateDate’ and it’s of type DateTime. Your time to compare with is: GETDATE() (which returns date + time) To get the datetime value of 12 hours before that, is done using DATEADD: DATEADD(hour, -12, GETDATE())

so if we want the # of rows added in the last 12 hours, we’ll do:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM Table WHERE CreateDate >= DATEADD(hour, -12, GETDATE()) 

in your proc, you’ve to store the result of this query into a variable and check if it’s > 0, so:

DECLARE @amount int SELECT @amount=COUNT(*) FROM Table WHERE CreateDate >= DATEADD(hour, -12, GETDATE()) 

and then you’ll check the @amount variable if it’s > 0.