sql - How to generate a range of numbers between two numbers?

Question

I have two numbers as input from the user, like for example 1000 and 1050.

How do I generate the numbers between these two numbers, using a sql query, in seperate rows? I want this:

 1000
 1001
 1002
 1003
 .
 .
 1050

Answer 1

Select non-persisted values with the VALUES keyword. Then use JOINs to generate lots and lots of combinations (can be extended to create hundreds of thousands of rows and beyond).

Short and fast version (not that easy to read):

WITH x AS (SELECT n FROM (VALUES (0),(1),(2),(3),(4),(5),(6),(7),(8),(9)) v(n))
SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY (SELECT NULL))
FROM x ones, x tens, x hundreds, x thousands
ORDER BY 1

Demo

More verbose version:

SELECT ones.n + 10*tens.n + 100*hundreds.n + 1000*thousands.n
FROM (VALUES(0),(1),(2),(3),(4),(5),(6),(7),(8),(9)) ones(n),
     (VALUES(0),(1),(2),(3),(4),(5),(6),(7),(8),(9)) tens(n),
     (VALUES(0),(1),(2),(3),(4),(5),(6),(7),(8),(9)) hundreds(n),
     (VALUES(0),(1),(2),(3),(4),(5),(6),(7),(8),(9)) thousands(n)
ORDER BY 1

Demo

Both versions can easily be extended with a WHERE clause, limiting the output of numbers to a user-specified range. If you want to reuse it, you can define a table-valued function for it.