Generate Date dimension in PL/SQL Table Function

Almost all data warehouse have a date dimension.  The purpose of the date dimension is to provide some pre-calculated grouping for dates.  It helps rolling up the data that entered against dates to a higher level, such as year, quarter, month, week, etc.

In some system, source files are used in generating the date dimension.  IMHO, it makes the modification to the logic difficult.  In some ETL programs, the task involves various table joins, try to generate the rows for the year range.

This post is for describing how to populate a table with rows for each date for a given year range.