Generate a list of all the dates in October 2012

One of the best features of Postgres over other DBs is a simple function called GENERATE_SERIES. This function allows you to generate a list of dates or numbers, specifying a start, an end, and an increment value. It's extremely useful for situations where you want to output, say, sales per day over the course of a month. A typical way to do that on a table containing a list of sales might be to use a SUM aggregation, grouping by the date and product type. Unfortunately, this approach has a flaw: if there are no sales for a given day, it won't show up! To make it work properly, you need to left join from a sequential list of timestamps to the aggregated data to fill in the blank spaces.

On other database systems, it's not uncommon to keep a 'calendar table' full of dates, with which you can perform these joins. Alternatively, on some systems you can write an analogue to generate_series using recursive CTEs. Fortunately for us, Postgres makes our lives a lot easier!