Inserting n number of records with T-SQL

Question

I want to add a variable number of records in a table (days)

And I've seen a neat solution for this:

SET @nRecords=DATEDIFF(d,'2009-01-01',getdate())
SET ROWCOUNT @nRecords
INSERT int(identity,0,1) INTO #temp FROM sysobjects a,sysobjects b
SET ROWCOUNT 0

But sadly that doesn't work in a UDF (because the #temp and the SET ROWCOUNT). Any idea how this could be achieved?

At the moment I'm doing it with a WHILE and a table variable, but in terms of performance it's not a good solution.

Answer 1

If you're using SQL 2005 or newer, you can use a recursive CTE to get a list of dates or numbers...

with MyCte AS
    (select   MyCounter = 0
     UNION ALL
     SELECT   MyCounter + 1
     FROM     MyCte
     where    MyCounter < DATEDIFF(d,'2009-01-01',getdate()))
select MyCounter, DATEADD(d, MyCounter, '2009-01-01')
from   MyCte 
option (maxrecursion 0)


/* output...
MyCounter   MyDate
----------- -----------------------
0           2009-01-01 00:00:00.000
1           2009-01-02 00:00:00.000
2           2009-01-03 00:00:00.000
3           2009-01-04 00:00:00.000
4           2009-01-05 00:00:00.000
5           2009-01-06 00:00:00.000
....
170         2009-06-20 00:00:00.000
171         2009-06-21 00:00:00.000
172         2009-06-22 00:00:00.000
173         2009-06-23 00:00:00.000
174         2009-06-24 00:00:00.000

(175 row(s) affected)

*/

Answer 2

You can use a WHILE statement for that:

declare @i int
declare @rows_to_insert int
set @i = 0
set @rows_to_insert = 1000

while @i < @rows_to_insert
    begin
    INSERT INTO #temp VALUES (@i)
    set @i = @i + 1
    end