Consolidating a date-time value into quarter hourly segments

Databases quite often capture date and time information to the millisecond in TimeStamp fields. However, it is rare that you will need to analyze this information to the millisecond or even to the minute. In fact, for the vast majority of implementations, we would only analyze to the day – or even higher.

If you do need to analyze time slices during a day, it would be rare to go down to the minute, mostly it would be to the hour. But it might want to go to the quarter hour. There is some debate on what minutes go into a quarter-hour slice, but I take a mathematical approach (time is a continuous numeric value) to this and use the Round function. Therefore, 11:58 would appear under 12:00 and 12:08 would go to 12:15.

Getting ready

Load the following script:

Load
  TimeCounter,
  Date(TimeStamp) as Date,
  WeekDay(TimeStamp) As WeekDay,
  TimeStamp(Round(TimeStamp, (1/(24))), 'M/D/YY HH:mm') As Hour,
  TimeStamp(Round(TimeStamp, (1/(24...