Get a list of dates between two dates

Question

Using standard mysql functions is there a way to write a query that will return a list of days between two dates.

eg given 2009-01-01 and 2009-01-13 it would return

Answer 1

We had a similar problem with BIRT reports in that we wanted to report on those days that had no data. Since there were no entries for those dates, the easiest solution for us was to create a simple table that stored all dates and use that to get ranges or join to get zero values for that date.

We have a job that runs every month to ensure that the table is populated 5 years out into the future. The table is created thus:

create table all_dates (
    dt date primary key
);

No doubt there are magical tricky ways to do this with different DBMS' but we always opt for the simplest solution. The storage requirements for the table are minimal and it makes the queries so much simpler and portable. This sort of solution is almost always better from a performance point-of-view since it doesn't require per-row calculations on the data.

The other option (and we've used this before) is to ensure there's an entry in the table for every date. We swept the table periodically and added zero entries for dates and/or times that didn't exist. This may not be an option in your case, it depends on the data stored.

If you really think it's a hassle to keep the all_dates table populated, a stored procedure is the way to go which will return a dataset containing those dates. This will almost certainly be slower since you have to calculate the range every time it's called rather than just pulling pre-calculated data from a table.

But, to be honest, you could populate the table out for 1000 years without any serious data storage problems - 365,000 16-byte (for example) dates plus an index duplicating the date plus 20% overhead for safety, I'd roughly estimate at about 14M [365,000 * 16 * 2 * 1.2 = 14,016,000 bytes]), a minuscule table in the scheme of things.