Jeff Moden (10/19/2013)

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AmarettoSlim (10/19/2013)

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Can I ask why you don't want a loop? Recursion via a common table expression (CTE) can be your friend in this case.

DECLARE @fromYear DATETIME, @toYear DATETIME

SELECT @fromYear='1913-01-01', @toYear='1998-01-01'

WITH YearSequence (Year) as

(

SELECT @fromYear AS Year

UNION ALL

SELECT DATEADD(YEAR, 1, Year)

FROM YearSequence

WHERE Year < @toyear

)

SELECT Year FROM YearSequence ORDER BY 1 DESC

Because of the extremely low rowcount, you can't actually see the insidious problem with CTE's that count. Please see the following article...

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/T-SQL/74118/

Also, your code didn't actually run right the first time I tried to run it because of missing semi-colons. You might also want to get out of the habit of using ORDER BY on a column ordinal because that method has been deprecated.

As for why you might want to avoid a loop, do you have a good reason for why you'd want to intentionally write slower code when faster code is easily available and usually easier to write?