t-sql select get all Months within a range of years

Question

I need a select to return Month and year Within a specified date range where I would input the start year and month and the select would return month and year from the date

Answer 1

Gosh folks... using a "counting recursive CTE" or "rCTE" is as bad or worse than using a loop. Please see the following article for why I say that.

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/T-SQL/74118/

Here's one way to do it without any RBAR including the "hidden RBAR" of a counting rCTE.

--===== Declare and preset some obviously named variables
DECLARE @StartDate DATETIME,
        @EndDate   DATETIME
;
 SELECT @StartDate = '2010-01-14', --We'll get the month for both of these 
        @EndDate   = '2020-12-05'  --dates and everything in between
;
WITH
cteDates AS
(--==== Creates a "Tally Table" structure for months to add to start date
     -- calulated by the difference in months between the start and end date.
     -- Then adds those numbers to the start of the month of the start date.
 SELECT TOP (DATEDIFF(mm,@StartDate,@EndDate) + 1)
        MonthDate = DATEADD(mm,DATEDIFF(mm,0,@StartDate) 
                  + (ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY (SELECT NULL)) -1),0)
   FROM sys.all_columns ac1
  CROSS JOIN sys.all_columns ac2
)
--===== Slice each "whole month" date into the desired display values.
 SELECT [Year]  = YEAR(MonthDate),
        [Month] = MONTH(MonthDate) 
   FROM cteDates
;