Question

I need to populate a table that will store the date ranges between 2 given dates: 09/01/11 – 10/10/11

So in this case the table would start from 09/01/11 and store each day till it got to 10/10/11
I was wondering if there was a slick way of doing this in SQL Server – I am currently using SQL Server 2008. Thanks

Answer 1

Easy on SQL 2005+; easier if you have a numbers or tally table. I faked it below:

DECLARE @StartDate DATE = '20110901'
  , @EndDate DATE = '20111001'

SELECT  DATEADD(DAY, nbr - 1, @StartDate)
FROM    ( SELECT    ROW_NUMBER() OVER ( ORDER BY c.object_id ) AS nbr
          FROM      sys.columns c
        ) nbrs
WHERE   nbr - 1 <= DATEDIFF(DAY, @StartDate, @EndDate)

If you have a tally table, replace the subquery with the table. No recursion.

EDIT: Since folks seem to have questions about the tally table, let me rewrite this using a zero-based tally table. First, here’s some code to create and populate a table.

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[nbrs](
    [nbr] [INT] NOT NULL
) ON [PRIMARY]
GO


CREATE UNIQUE CLUSTERED INDEX [clidx] ON [dbo].[nbrs]
(
    [nbr] ASC
)
GO

INSERT INTO dbo.nbrs (nbr)
SELECT nbr-1
FROM ( SELECT    ROW_NUMBER() OVER ( ORDER BY c.object_id ) AS nbr
          FROM      sys.columns c
        ) nbrs
GO

Now, that you have the numbers table as a permanent object in your database, you can reuse it for the query INSTEAD of the subquery. The query has also been edited to use a zero-based calculation.

DECLARE @StartDate DATE = '20110901'
      , @EndDate DATE = '20111001'

SELECT  DATEADD(DAY, nbr, @DateStart)
FROM    nbrs
WHERE   nbr <= DATEDIFF(DAY, @DateStart, @DateEnd)

Performant, and no recursion.