pharmkittie (2/1/2015)
Thank you everyone. All your answers helped me with my question. The reason I was not able to just parameterize the date and quarter to solve the entire problem is because the column names often vary each quarter, even when most of them mean the same thing as the last quarter. I have asked a few times if the people who pull the raw data could use a consistent naming scheme but they won't. They always come back with: The measures may change from quarter to quarter, to which I reply: Any new measures are fine; I can add or subtract measures. But I'm hoping that the measures that stay the same from quarter to quarter can have the same names. Answer is no.
I've actually also seen instances of yearly specific stuff, this time from a commercial software vendor, and the tables would have the year in the name and have different columns from the tables from previous years. The reasoning is that when adding and removing columns, historical data wouldn't have to be involved in these changes.
Right? Wrong? Who knows, but its their product and decision so thats that.