The Surly Admin

Calculating the Quarter

Quick post since it’s been awhile since I’ve done anything.  I’ve mentioned before but I do a lot of reports, and I recently got one to do some calculations for 95th percentile–well, kind of.  The funny thing was the person who asked me was supposed to be making a solution themselves, kind of homework from the boss but they didn’t mention it to me and I thought it would be a fun challenge so I went and wrote up a script that could do it, parameters and everything.   Oops!  Anyway, when done they loved the report so I streamlined it from taking 10 minutes to run to about 1 or 2 (all in SQL, no PowerShell) and thought I was done with it.  Then came the ask, not only do they want that data for the month, they want it for the whole quarter!  So now I had to figure out which quarter I was in and what the date range for that would be.  Yeah, I could put it in by hand, but there’s no challenge in that.

First came a Google to see if someone could do it in a one liner, and sure enough Vinoth over at StackOverflow had some great maths for that.  Now calculate the dates and the easiest way was to simply create a little loop 1 through 4 and calculate my dates:

First use Get-Date to get the January 1st, then loop 4 times adding 3 months each time to get the date ranges.  Now to get a date range for the current quarter?  $Quarters[$Quarter].

November 15, 2016 - Posted by Martin9700 | PowerShell | Hashtable, quarter