thanks futurity,

these were exactly my original thoughts. I was planning to use the first method you suggested (generating the calendar in the application layer) as I wasn't aware of doing it within the sql itself. my colleague however, said that looping through the events to see if they applicable to the current day would be more time consuming than just joining a calendar table and and events table. I have found a few calendar systems that only store events so this must be the approach they use.