Let's say I have an 'employees' table with employee start and end dates, like so:
employees
employee_id start_date end_date
53 '19901117' '99991231'
54 '19910208' '20010512'
55 '19910415' '20120130'
. . .
. . .
. . .
And let's say I want to get the monthly count of employees who were employed at the end of the month. So the resulting data set I'm after would look like:
month count of employees
'20150131' 120
'20150228' 118
'20150331' 122
. .
. .
. .
The best way I currently know how to do this is to create a "helper" table to join onto, such as:
helper_tbl
month
'20150131'
'20150228'
'20150331'
.
.
.
And then do a query like so:
SELECT t0b.month,
count(t0a.employee_id)
FROM employees t0a
JOIN helper_tbl t0b
ON t0b.month BETWEEN t0a.start_date AND t0a.end_date
GROUP BY t0b.month
However, this is somewhat annoying solution to me, because it means I'm having to create these little helper tables all the time and they clutter up my schema. I feel like other people must run into the same need for "helper" tables, but I'm guessing people have figured out a better way to go about this that isn't so manual. Or do you all really just keep creating "helper" tables like I do to get around these situations?
I understand this question is a bit open-ended up for stack overflow, so let me offer a more closed-ended version of the question which is, "Given just the 'employees' table, what would YOU do to get the resulting data set that I showed above?"