I have a Dates table and I really love it. This week I needed to do a calculation where I take my monthly budget, divide it by the number of working days in a month and then times it by the working days for the week. That will give me a weekly budget number without having to store it, plus my company only gives me monthly numbers. I had already figured out the daily number and had the calculation working for a 5 day work week when New Years day made everyone notice that it was 5 and I was cheating. So I added a Column to my Dates table to tell me on any given day the number of working days in that week. My weeks run from Sunday to Saturday. I have a Date in my dates table for both the start of the week and the start of the next week. I have a flag (1,0) that says whether or not a day is a weekday and another for whether a day is a holiday. Using this flags, I can pass in a range of dates and get the number of working weekdays.

UPDATE Dates 
SET WorkDaysInWeek = WeekDays 
FROM Dates D 
INNER JOIN  
(SELECT BegW, SUM(IsWeekDay) - SUM(IsHoliday) AS WeekDays 
FROM Dates 
WHERE FullDate Between BegW AND NextWeekStart 
GROUP BY BegW) W ON D.BegW = W.BegW

—————UPDATE—————

But wait, there’s more. Rob Farley who is on twitter @rob_farley sent me an even better way to do it. It gets rid of the need for a WHERE or GROUP BY because we are using OVER. We hoped it would eliminate the sub-query and it does if our query is only a SELECT, but when I go to do an UPDATE, it says that “Windows functions can only appear in the SELECT and ORDER BY clauses”. Rob suggested I use a CTE instead.  I hadn’t ever used a CTE without joining back to it so he taught me how.

This is the super awesome SELECT:

SELECT BegW,SUM(IsWeekday - IsHoliday) OVER (PARTITION BY BegW) AS WeekDays
FROM Dates 

Here is what the UPDATE ended up looking like.

WITH d AS (
SELECT *,SUM(IsWeekday - IsHoliday) OVER (PARTITION BY BegW) AS WeekDays
FROM Dates)
UPDATE d SET WorkDaysInWeek = WeekDays;

The other question that Rob had was what if we have holidays on weekends. This is a great question. At my company, the holiday would be shifted to one of the days of the week, so the counts would still be correct. But if you are in a situation where that is not the case you can change the where clause like this:

WHERE [DayOfWeek] NOT IN (1,7)

As I was writing my where clause, I noticed I did something bad and used a reserved word as a column name. If you happen to make this mistake as well, just make sure to put square brackets [] around the word when you use it.

Huge thank you to Rob for being so kind to help me be better! One of my new goals is to play with OVER and understand how to use it and when. I am also going to be learning more about CTE’s and not having to use joins. Yay! New toys!!!!!