I have to quibble a bit on the definition of recursion and the article provides a hint to support this.

"Way back when", recursion was taught as "a function which calls itself with parameters|data|whatever in a simpler version of themselves [compared to what was passed in].  Eventually, you will reach a base or termination case which will cause the recursion to unravel itself and provide a solution.

Rob,

  for some reason your function didn't work for me. I changed it a bit to get it working here and changed basically two things:

1) As we are using recursion there is no need for an explicit loop inside the function. The iteration is done using the consecutive calls to the function.

2) I get rid of the HH:MM:SS of the startDate in order to compare with the dates on the Holiday table. Otherwise the comparison would be like '2005-11-07 16:41:03' = '2005-11-07 00:00:00', which would evaluate to FALSE.

Below is the code with the changes.

Cheers,

Andre

create function fnGetNextBusinessDay (@startDate smalldatetime)
returns smalldatetime as

Begin
Declare @nextBusDay smalldatetime
Declare @weekDay tinyInt

set @nextBusDay = convert(datetime,left(convert(varchar,@startDate + 1,120),10),120) -- first get the raw next day

SET @weekDay =((@@dateFirst+datePart(dw,@nextBusDay)-2) % 7) + 1

if @weekDay in (6, 7) or exists (select 1 from holiday where holidayDate = @nextBusDay)
set @nextBusDay = dbo.fnGetNextBusinessDay(@nextBusDay)

return (@nextBusDay)

End

Hi Rob,

While the function uses some nifty tricks (I particularly like the trick to get correct results regardless of datefirst setting; this is a new trick for me), I'd never recommend using this function to anyone.

There are other ways to achieve this. Ways that are, in my opinion, better. Check out http://www.aspfaq.com/show.asp?id=2519, and especially the section titled "Pre-determine delivery dates".

Best, Hugo

Elegant solution (I too like the trick to get the correct day regardless of datefirst!  Clever!).  BUT...  recursion in SQL is limited to 32 calls (XMAS holidays in schools, for example, go a lot longer than this) - it could easily have been done with a simple loop, or better yet, a simple select statement...

In our software where we have to keep track of days a clinic is open for business, rather than messing around with such procedures, we just have a dates table with one value for each day and a bit flag representing opened or closed...  Makes reporting VERY easy and you can join to the table easily to group days together efficiently, etc.  For similar ideas and more info on why just storing the data in a table can be efficient, look up "numbers table" on this site - Adam Machanic has quite a bit written about them.

But I still like that modulus trick!!

Cute, but I agree with Ian, if you are using a table why not maintain the correct dates in the table, it is MUCH easier to work with.

I did not know the 32 levels of recursion limitation, thanks

One thing to note.

@@Datefirst is affected by things like the defaultlanguage property of your language.

I believe that for the US @@Datefirst defaults to 7, whereas if you set up your login to use British English, as we brits often do, it will be 1.

This will affect what Datepart(weekday, getdate()) returns.

Just something to be aware of, I've had problems with this before.

Paul Cresham posted an elegant solution for this including working out holidays on the fly, albeit for the UK.  It did contain a nifty Easter algorithm, as well as tackling the @@DATEFIRST problem.  see

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/forums/shwmessage.aspx?forumid=23&messageid=110259

I documented it with an example of how we use it at

http://glossopian.co.uk/pmwiki.php?n=Main.WorkingDays

Dave Jackson

Here's another version of the Easter Calculation algorithm:

http://sqlservercentral.com/cs/blogs/michael_coles/archive/2005/07/16/49.aspx

And something for calculating "floating" American holidays:

http://sqlservercentral.com/cs/blogs/michael_coles/archive/2005/07/17/52.aspx

Rob- I like this example. It will work for our business because we don't take long holidays

Thanks, Matt