Comments on: Building ranges using a dynamically generated numbers table

By: stuart

stuart — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 13:26:06 +0000

Hey Jeff,

Sorry for the late reply; been a busy couple of weeks. I never disavowed the method; I jsut never went back and changed the code. After looking at it for a couple of minutes this morning, I figured out how to alter my proc, but honestly, it’s not a priority. I’ll keep it in mind forthe future, though.

Stu

By: Jeff Moden

Jeff Moden — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 15:08:16 +0000

Heh… after more than a year, I’m just curious… have you embraced the idea of using a numbers table or are you still using recurrsion for such a thing?

By: stuart

stuart — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 19:36:37 +0000

Hey Jeff,

I’ve used Numbers table before, but I couldn’t figure out a way to use them to generate a table of ranges; see the latter half of my post.

I tried modifying your method, but it’s 3:30 on a Friday, and I’m brain dead

Stu

By: Jeff Moden

Jeff Moden — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:20:13 +0000

Hi Stuart,

After running the following comparison code, you may want to reconsider the idea of using recursion…

SET STATISTICS IO ON
PRINT REPLICATE(‘=’,80)
PRINT ‘========== Stefan Keir Gordon”s method ==========’
SET STATISTICS TIME ON
;WITH Numbers(n) AS
(SELECT 1 AS n
UNION ALL
SELECT (n + 1) AS n
FROM Numbers
WHERE n <= 32767)
SELECT n
FROM Numbers
WHERE n<=32767
OPTION(MAXRECURSION 32767)
SET STATISTICS TIME OFF

PRINT REPLICATE('=',80)
PRINT '========== Jeff Moden''s method =========='
SET STATISTICS TIME ON

SELECT TOP 32767
ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY (ac1.Object_ID)) AS N
FROM Master.sys.All_Columns ac1
CROSS JOIN Master.sys.All_Columns ac2

SET STATISTICS TIME OFF
SET STATISTICS IO OFF
PRINT REPLICATE('=',80)

You may also want to start delving into the idea of having a permanent Tally or Numbers table. Please see the following article.

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/T-SQL/62867/