Say you want a weekly sales report grouped by each day and you want to show days with zero sales. Usually this is accomplished by creating and joining to a date table that has one row for each day. If you're going to be doing this report all the time or need additional groupings like quarter or fiscal year, than it makes sense to create this table. But sometimes I need to do this for one report in a database that doesn't already have this table. For oracle, Uli Bethke describes what I think is the best way to date. In short, it's clever use of oracle's 'connect by' clause to recursively join dual to itself. For example, the following would generate all days in march:
SELECT
trunc(to_date('1-mar-2009','dd-mon-yyyy')) + NUMTODSINTERVAL(n,'day') AS Full_Date
FROM (
select (level-1) n
from dual
connect by level-1 <= trunc(to_date('31-mar-2009','dd-mon-yyyy')) - trunc(to_date('1-mar-2009','dd-mon-yyyy'))
);