calendar – sqlsunday.com

The SQL Server Calendar project

I’m the type of developer that invents wheels. Yes, every wheel I design is unique in its own way, and hand-crafted for a specific purpose. And so it has also been with calendar dimensions (typically when I do data warehousing work).

This got me thinking – why not design the mother of all calendar dimensions? One that includes every conceivable calendar and property that I and others could use and re-use. One that could save me a ton of coding, and lessen the burden of having to validate it each and every time?

And that’s how I got started designing my one calendar script to rule them all.

Building a calendar dimension with public holidays

Whenever you’re building a data warehouse or similar solution, you’ll probably want to have a “calendar dimension”, a table that contains all days in a range of years. A challenge with this type of table is getting all the public holidays right, which could be particularly important if your business depends on this, like financial markets or logistics.

Calculating the date of easter sunday

We’ve previously looked at how to calculate recurring public holidays. However, calculating the date of easter sunday is not as simple as you might think, because it involves calculations of lunar phases. This short post contains a T-SQL translation of the popularly used Meeus-Jones-Butcher formula.

Calculating business days and holidays

A common scenario you may have encountered is the need to calculate the first business day after a given date. There are quite a few ugly ways to solve this, including cursors, but there are also some pretty neat ways to approach the problem, and as a bonus, you’ll learn about recursion and the new LEAD(), LAG() functions and accumulation in T-SQL.

A function to calculate recurring dates

When you’re using Microsoft Outlook, or pretty much any other personal information manager, you can create calendar appointments that are “recurring”, i.e. you can have them repeat at a defined frequency. This, however may not only apply to your project meeting appointments, but also to some database solution. I decided to give it a go at building a table value function that returns a list of dates, based on a given set of parameters.