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.

Working with intervals

At one point or another, you’re going to come across intervals when working in SQL Server. You could say that an interval is where you don’t have a single value, but actually a range of values, commonly delimited within a start and an end value. This range could be a group of accounts, versions of dimension members (in an SCD) or date/time intervals.

Date formats and conversions

Have you noticed how date conversions can seem a bit arbitrary at times? How a string value is translated to a date depends on a number of factors, including how you perform the conversion and what language settings you have set for your connection. But there are ways to limit your conversion headaches.