As a SQL Server DBA I was fortunate enough to encounter the idea of a numbers table — principally due to the work of Itzik Ben Gan (e.g. in books like ‘Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005: T-SQL Querying’)… but I’ve not found many internet resources for a numbers tables in PostgreSQL. I’m working with Postgres at the moment, so I thought it would be good to provide a little introduction.

What is a Numbers Table?

Quite simply; a table with sequential integer numbers in; typically starting from 0 or 1 (or perhaps, both, as we shall see)… we can then use this table to join to other tables to provide useful functionality.