Question

I’m working on a report that needs to retrieve

• all employees
• new additions this month
• new additions this year
• terminations this month
• terminations this year

All of these are split up by department (new marketing emps, new sales, etc).

In total, there’ll be about 23 columns..

I’m using a temporary table by populating each field with an update. Here’s a simplified example of what I’m doing. Employee table has most of the values needed (hiredate, termdate, etc). There’s actually a join in each update and some more conditions.

update #tmptbl
set MtdHiresSales = select count(empid) from emp e where e.dept = 012 
                           and hiredate between start_of_month() and getdate()
                           -- more predicates
set MtdHiresMkting = ...repeat... with e.dept=013

I’m sure there’s a better way because there’s a lot of code duplication. Are temporary tables appropriate in this case? I’m not sure how it could be done without one. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

You can probably use a CASE for this. For example:

SELECT 
SUM(CASE WHEN e.dept=012 
    AND Hiredate between Start_of_Month() and Getdate() 
    AND... 
    THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) AS 'MtdHiresSales',
...
FROM ...
WHERE ...