I need to make a temporary table that holds of range of dates, as well as a couple of columns that hold placeholder values (0) for future use. The dates I need are the first day of each month between $startDate and $endDate where these variables can be several years apart.
My original sql statement looked like this:
select dbo.FirstOfMonth(InsertDate) as Month, 0 as Trials, 0 as Sales
into #dates
from customer
group by dbo.FirstOfMonth(InsertDate)
"FirstOfMonth" is a user-defined function I made that pretty much does what it says, returning the first day of the month for the provided date with the time at exactly midnight.
This produced almost exactly what I needed until I discovered there were occasionally gaps in my dates where I had a few months were there were no records insert dates. Since my result must still have the missing months I need a different approach.
I have added the following declarations to the stored procedure anticipating their need for the range of the dates I need ...
declare $startDate set $startDate = select min(InsertDate) from customer
declare $endDate set $endDate = select max(InsertDate) from customer
... but I have no idea what to do from here.
I know this question is similar to this question but, quite frankly, that answer is over my head (I don't often work with SQL and when I do it tends to be on older versions of SQL Server) and there are a few minor differences that are throwing me off.
This will quickly populate a table with 170 years worth of dates.
CREATE TABLE CalendarMonths (
date DATETIME,
PRIMARY KEY (date)
)
DECLARE
@basedate DATETIME,
@offset INT
SELECT
@basedate = '01 Jan 2000',
@offset = 1
WHILE (@offset < 2048)
BEGIN
INSERT INTO CalendarMonths SELECT DATEADD(MONTH, @offset, date) FROM CalendarMonths
SELECT @offset = @offset + @offset
END
You can then use it by LEFT joining on to that table, for the range of dates you require.