How to Select records that don't exist in Sql Server

Question

This isn\'t about checking if a record exists before selecting it, or viceversa.

The issue is this, I have a database with many records, they are stored by date, by

Answer 1

This should work:

WITH
    -- Numbers CTE, courtesy Itzik Ben-Gan
  L0   AS(SELECT 1 AS c UNION ALL SELECT 1),
  L1   AS(SELECT 1 AS c FROM L0 AS A CROSS JOIN L0 AS B),
  L2   AS(SELECT 1 AS c FROM L1 AS A CROSS JOIN L1 AS B),
  L3   AS(SELECT 1 AS c FROM L2 AS A CROSS JOIN L2 AS B),
  L4   AS(SELECT 1 AS c FROM L3 AS A CROSS JOIN L3 AS B),
  Nums AS(SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY (SELECT NULL)) AS n FROM L4),
    -- Turn into Dates
  Dates AS(SELECT CAST('18991231' AS DATETIME)+n AS d FROM Nums)
SELECT * 
FROM Dates d
LEFT JOIN myTable t ON d.d = t.[date]
WHERE d.d>='02/01/2014' AND d.d<='02/03/2014'

Here is a version that is optimized for smaller date ranges:

DECLARE @startDate datetime = '2/1/2014'
DECLARE @endDate datetime = '2/3/2014'
DECLARE @days as INT = DATEDIFF(dd, @startDate, @enddate) + 1
;
WITH
    -- Numbers CTE, courtesy Itzik Ben-Gan
  L0   AS(SELECT 1 AS c UNION ALL SELECT 1),
  L1   AS(SELECT 1 AS c FROM L0 AS A CROSS JOIN L0 AS B),
  L2   AS(SELECT 1 AS c FROM L1 AS A CROSS JOIN L1 AS B),
  L3   AS(SELECT 1 AS c FROM L2 AS A CROSS JOIN L2 AS B),
  L4   AS(SELECT 1 AS c FROM L3 AS A CROSS JOIN L3 AS B),
  T4   AS(SELECT TOP (@days) 1 AS c FROM L4),
  Nums AS(SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY (SELECT NULL))-1 AS n FROM T4),
    -- Turn into Dates
  Dates AS(SELECT @startDate+n AS d FROM Nums)
SELECT * 
FROM Dates d
LEFT JOIN myTable t ON d.d = t.[date]
WHERE d.d>=@startDate AND d.d<=@endDate