Dates

Just after Adam Machanic announced the first of the T-SQL Tuesday blog events, I was asked a question about how to return a list of all the dates between two given days. I came across some good forum posts about how to do so, many of which utilised numbers tables. I wanted to avoid that (nothing against them, just wanted something that was stand-alone), and figured that a CTE would be the best way to go; in fact someone had posted such a method, a little of which I have used here (if I can find the post again I'll give them a mention in the comments!

In Reporting Services, formatting dates can become a headache for the developer, often due to differing regional settings on servers, development boxes etc. Therefore I've found it much more useful to force the report to use a particular format, rather than allow the server settings to decide for me. Previously I would have used FormatDateTime in the expression, as shown here: =FormatDateTime(Fields!DateStamp.Value, DateFormat.ShortDate) Depending on the regional settings, this could return either 12/3/2008 or 3/12/2008.