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Asked: 2026-05-10T23:51:04+00:00

Sorry about the vague subject but I couldn’t think what to put. Here’s my

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Sorry about the vague subject but I couldn’t think what to put.

Here’s my problem, I’m doing a query on a table that returns me a count of items related to a day. I want to make sure that if I do a query on the DB, I always get a set number of rows. For example, imagine I have the following table that contains a log of when people log into a website:

**WebsiteLogin** id: Integer login_date: Datetime

I can then get counts of the logins for each date by doing something like:

SELECT DATE(login_date), COUNT(*) FROM WebsiteLogin GROUP BY DATE(login_date)

Which works great and will return me the data I want. But imagine my website was quite unpopular on the weekends. The data returned would look like:

2008-12-10, 100 2008-12-11, 124 2008-12-12, 151 2008-12-15, 141 2008-12-16, 111

The 13th & 14th are missing because there was no data for those dates. Is there any way I can change my query so that I get data that includes all the dates I query on. E.g.

2008-12-10, 100 2008-12-11, 124 2008-12-12, 151 2008-12-13, 0 2008-12-14, 0 2008-12-15, 141 2008-12-16, 111

I imagine I could do this if I set up a table containing all the dates in a year and then using a left/right join but that’s really messy way of doing it.

So any clues on a nice way to do this in SQL? Or is programmatically my only choice? Cheers for any input.

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  1. I imagine I could do this if I set up a table containing all the dates in a year and then using a left/right join but that’s really messy way of doing it.

    Nope. That’s pretty much how to do it. On the other hand, you can use a temporary table and populate it with just the date range required.

    If only MS SQL had virtual tables, where you provided a generator function…

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