Creating A Sortable Key Using ROW_NUMBER



I recently had a case where I wanted to get a regular academic term n terms from a given date.  For example if I was in the Fall Term of 2018, I wanted to be able to get the term 2 terms before which would be Spring 2018.

The problem is we use term codes, which have changed formatting over the years, and we also have partial terms which I didn't want to consider.  The data ends up looking something like this:

TermSK
TermCode
1
201780
6
201810
17
201850


    SELECT ROW_NUMBER() over(order by term_code desc) Row_Num, Term_Code
    FROM dimTerm
    WHERE Term_Type =  'Regular'

Row_Num
TermCode
3
201780
2
201810
1
201850

The results made it really easy to grab any term preceding by simply subtracting the desired previous terms from the generated Row_Num.

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