It's customary to share your final solution, if you don't mind.

Jon,

David is correct... since Julian dates recycle every 10 years, should we assume that you will never have a future dated Julian date?

Also, would you rather (recommended) have the date...

David is correct... his link leads to some code I wrote for him to make a "dynamic" cross-tab.  Might have a fat-finger here and there but David wrote and posted...

Jennifer,

Since you want this done in OLTP instead of OLAP, these are more commonly known as "crosstabs" and they run pretty darned fast especially when compared to a cursor and...

With all the good solutions, I feel a little silly posting this but it's nasty fast... and, since a lot of folks keep their Tally (numbers) tables down to something...

Defaults don't work on rows that have already been inserted.  Leaving it up to Developers to remember to include it in code is OK provided the code has to go...

Thanks for the nice things you said, David.  Surprisingly enough, I don't believe you'll find a huge performance gap just because of the use of the Dynamic SQL.  Dynamic SQL...

BWAAAA-HAAAAA-HAAAAAA-HAAAAA!   I just ran the same set of tests on a 4 processor box "real server" with minor traffic for 2,000,000 records using my previous test code and the differences...

Ok, so does that short-term bottleneck stuff explain why my latest test consistently showed that the UDF code was twice as slow as the clear code regardless of the number...

Vladan and Sushila are correct... you may also just try finding the first day of the next month and the looking for anything less than that.

Just keep in mind, David... it breaks at 8k... I think that won't happen for quite some time, though.

Manchester UK, eh?  I've always wanted to see that place... I may...

Exec sp_Locks

Don't fight 'em... don't tell 'em... put triggers on the tables for these.  Most developers don't even know how to spell trigger never mind go looking for them.

Ummmm.... since when is 12/01/2005 a month end date?

Good thinking Chandra.  I'll have to try it that way sometime because it looks like a really good idea especially since it wouldn't have the 8k limit in the method...