You can get into a situation where you have two tables with values associated with date ranges. What’s worse, those date ranges don’t necessarily have to align, which can make joining them a seemingly complex task, but it is surprisingly simple when you learn how to think of overlapping date ranges, along with this relatively simple T-SQL join pattern.
Tag: distribution
How to fix rounding errors
A number of business processes require you to distribute a value over a date range. However, if your distribution keys and values don’t add up perfectly or aren’t perfectly divisible, it’s very easy to get rounding errors in your distributions.
Distributing values with overlapping ranges
Today, we’re going to look at how to distribute values with what I call “overlapping ranges”. What I mean by that is that the value that you need to distribute has a given range and the objects you want to distribute the values to are also defined as ranges. Sound complicated? It doesn’t have to.
How to build a histogram in T-SQL
Talk to SQL Server developers or DBAs about histograms, and they’ll inevitably think of index statistics. However, a task you may encounter some day is to calculate the distribution of numbers in a table. And although there’s no quick built-in function to do this, it’s not as difficult as you may think.