Teaching is a vocation or career? I remember to ask this question to myself many years ago, specifically when I was living in my birth country Nicaragua. Maybe in other context or social realities this never would be a question and less a dilemma, however, the context and circumstances determine us to think and ask us many questions. After some years living in Europe and “struggling” for adapting and adopting some thoughts that would be the answer to my initial question about teaching, nowadays is more clear that some years ago, but with some highlights that I would like to mention through this post.

First at all, I would like to start this simple blog saying: Thank you everyone who was part of this marvelous adventure, my wife who support me in an exceptional way from the beginning, especially encourage me to do a step forward, you know how much I love you Lauren , and thanks to my kids (Octi and Giovanna) for their patience and understand that Dad needed a little of time for preparing the presentation.

This is the second article of a series dedicated to implementing Recursive Common Table Expression in different kind of scenarios, and this time I will address another use case; it basically consists in filling gaps inside a sequence of an incomplete range of dates.  I would like to comment that the next example has been taken from MSDN forum, I have chosen because I think it is an excellent way to prove how versatile the recursive CTE is, the most creative solution was proposed by Peter Larsson (swePeso) and he brought us  a valid and optimal implementation which is useful since SQL Server 2005 and up versions.

I remember the first time that I discovered the amazing feature called Common Table Expression (CTE), it was during my first read of Itzik Ben-Gan book (T-SQL Querying), maybe one of the most interesting feature together with Windows Functions.  I know, I am a declared fan of CTE, but we can start defining a CTE as a sort of temporary result set and which exists only during the lifetime of the query.

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