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Building A Calendar Table

Louis Davidson has an example of a calendar table in SQL Server:

The solution is part of my calendar/date dimension code, and it is used to do relative positioning over date periods. For example, say you have the need to get data from the 10 days. You can definitely use a simple between to filter the rows, and a bunch of date functions to group by year, month, etc., generally all of the “normal” groupings. But using a calendar table allows you to prebuild a set of date calculations that make the standard values easier to get, and non-standard groupings possible. The technique I will cover makes moving around in the groupings more easily accessible. Like if you want data from the last 3 complete months. The query to do this isn’t rocket science, but it isn’t exactly straightforward either.

For the example, I will use the calendar table that I have on my website here: http://drsql.org/code in the download SimpleDateDimensionCreateAndLoad, and will load it with data up until 2020. Here is that structure:

Read on for examples of usage.  This is an example where thinking relationally differs from thinking procedurally—imagining date ranges as pre-calculated sets isn’t intuitive to procedural developers, but it can give a big performance boost.