Louis Davidson has a function for us:
As I have been building my Twitter management software, I have been doing a lot more ad-hoc, repetitive coding using T-SQL directly. When I was generating new tweets for upcoming days, a bit of the process that got old quick was getting the date for an upcoming day (the primary key for my tweet table is the date, the type of the tweet, and a sequence number). After having to pick the date of next Tuesday… I had to write some more code (because a true programmer doesn’t do repetitive work when code can be written… even if sometimes the code doesn’t save you time for days or weeks.
So this following function was born from that need, and it is something I could imagine most anyone using semi-regularly, especially when testing software.
This is definitely fancy. My inclination would be to create a calendar table, as that’ll solve this particular issue as well as other complex variants (like, I want the next Tuesday which doesn’t fall on a holiday).