September 22, 2010 at 8:25 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Fun with business days, calendar tables, and test-driven development
September 23, 2010 at 1:21 am
Hi
Just a suggestion - but when you are doing your workday bit - you should really ensure you get the right setting for datefirst into the script, otherwise you might find it going horribly wrong...
September 23, 2010 at 1:32 am
The article tries to cover too much ground and ends up doing none of the topics justice. In particular, the first function described would have been much better implemented as an additional column on the calendar table -- a key benefit of such tables is that they allow results to be looked up rather than calculated.
September 23, 2010 at 2:36 am
Very nice article Alex, thank you.
Indeed IsBusinessDate 'Y' or 'N' is great for building an understanding of the concepts, I remember when I implemented this functionality using something similar; I used the name of the holiday in the HolidayName field ('Sunday', 'Saturday', 'Easter', 'Independence day', etc. ) and considering as business day the records where HolidayName is null or empty.
This helped me when I was asked "why there are less working days this month?" 🙂, and I had the answer at hand. Also it was easy for the HR to define company's holidays as they might change during the year, by just typing the name of the holiday in the interface.
I am curious in approaching multiple calendars, i.e. for different departments or for different geographies.
For example: National days are different for most of the countries but also some religious holidays, Italian branch of one company has the Easter holiday in another period of time than Russian branch.
Also for production department some Saturdays might be business/working days since for sales dept. Saturdays might be weekends/non business days.
Kind regards,
Iulian Cozma
September 23, 2010 at 3:09 am
I'd agree with feakesj, we've got an 'is working day' bit field. Work out the days by counting that value between the two dates, simple. Looks this is an over engineered solution. However, I will admit that this solution dosnt work well if multiple sites/ business units have different holidays, but then again neither would the articles solution.
September 23, 2010 at 6:51 am
Someone should really make a list of US Federal Holidays. You would think that data.gov would have something like that.
As many have done before me, I ended up making my own table. None of the solutions I found online addressed the move of fixed-date holidays to prior Fridays or following Mondays. And most of them had Groundhog Day in there like that actually means anything outside Punxsutawney.
September 23, 2010 at 8:00 am
Andrew,
Is this any good for you? - http://www.opm.gov/operating_status_schedules/fedhol/2010.asp
btw, Groundhog Day was on TV this weeend in the UK, hadn't seen it in years 🙂
September 23, 2010 at 8:11 am
wildh (9/23/2010)
Andrew,Is this any good for you? - http://www.opm.gov/operating_status_schedules/fedhol/2010.asp
btw, Groundhog Day was on TV this weeend in the UK, hadn't seen it in years 🙂
This is the master list as provided by the US government, but it's not very easy to parse.
Someone needs to make this list into something clean like XML, JSON, etc. Hell, even a CSV would be better than parsing 10 web pages with weekday names and optional asterisks.
September 23, 2010 at 8:29 am
Is this any good - http://facility9.com/2009/04/23/populating-us-federal-holidays-in-a-calendar-table/
or -
We have a similar issue in the UK but it's only a 10 min job to crib it from a web site into a update script. But hang on, then it's a 4 month wait for the DBA's to run it.
September 23, 2010 at 8:52 am
Many times I have had to ask what portion of this date range was non-work time.
This does indeed vary by geography so we have added gmt start and end for each holiday.
We then have to handle four cases to determine the overlaps so the function has to sum the time from UNION ALL of the cases.
I can post this function if anyone is interested but if there is a better way please let me know.
September 23, 2010 at 8:52 am
Alexander Kuznetsov (9/22/2010)
Comments posted to this topic are about the item <A HREF="/articles/Test-Driven+Development/71075/">Fun with business days, calendar tables, and test-driven development</A>
That's right, I concur. Thanks!
September 23, 2010 at 8:55 am
feakesj (9/23/2010)
The article tries to cover too much ground and ends up doing none of the topics justice. In particular, the first function described would have been much better implemented as an additional column on the calendar table -- a key benefit of such tables is that they allow results to be looked up rather than calculated.
If we only have one typical query, then adding one column makes sense. If, however, we have dozens fo different queries, such as "last business day of current month", "first business day of next month" and such, keeping too many columns, and maintaining them if there is an additional holiday (such as President Ford's funeral) becomes very messy.
September 23, 2010 at 9:07 am
Iulian -207023 (9/23/2010)
Very nice article Alex, thank you.Indeed IsBusinessDate 'Y' or 'N' is great for building an understanding of the concepts, I remember when I implemented this functionality using something similar; I used the name of the holiday in the HolidayName field ('Sunday', 'Saturday', 'Easter', 'Independence day', etc. ) and considering as business day the records where HolidayName is null or empty.
This helped me when I was asked "why there are less working days this month?" 🙂, and I had the answer at hand. Also it was easy for the HR to define company's holidays as they might change during the year, by just typing the name of the holiday in the interface.
I am curious in approaching multiple calendars, i.e. for different departments or for different geographies.
For example: National days are different for most of the countries but also some religious holidays, Italian branch of one company has the Easter holiday in another period of time than Russian branch.
Also for production department some Saturdays might be business/working days since for sales dept. Saturdays might be weekends/non business days.
Kind regards,
Iulian Cozma
Iulian,
We have multiple calendars, for countries and individul companies as well. For instance, Chicago Mercantile Exchange's calendar is sometimes different from the offcial US one. All we need to do is to add CalendarName column to the primary key, and @CalendarName parameter to all these functions.
September 23, 2010 at 9:14 am
I frequently used a similar table where I used to work. It was the Date Dimension table from our data warehouse. Look around, you may already have something like this, and the logic to build it, on one of your servers.
For best practices on asking questions, please read the following article: Forum Etiquette: How to post data/code on a forum to get the best help[/url]
September 23, 2010 at 9:15 am
wildh (9/23/2010)
Is this any good - http://facility9.com/2009/04/23/populating-us-federal-holidays-in-a-calendar-table/or -
We have a similar issue in the UK but it's only a 10 min job to crib it from a web site into a update script. But hang on, then it's a 4 month wait for the DBA's to run it.
Yup, that's basically the T-SQL I ended up writing. If you want to be picky, there is also a US law that gives federal employees a holiday for presidential inaugurations but only in certain jurisdictions near Washington DC. There are also unplanned holidays like when Gerald Ford dies.
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