I'm trying to INSERT date variable into my SQL server.
The input format I'm trying to insert is: dd-mm-yyyy
And my SQL server column (which defined as type DATE) expect mm-dd-yyyy.
My PC date format is dd-mm-yyyy.
The error msg:
Conversion failed when converting date and/or time from character string.
Questions:
Why is the expected format mm-dd-yyyy and not dd-mm-yyyy?
How can I make the INSERT command work with this or another date format?
Thanks.
The format that your PC uses for dates doesn't matter when passing literal string for dates, the language setting for the LOGIN you are using to connect to SQL Server does. As the value is being interpreted as MM-dd-yyyy this very likely means that your language setting is (American) ENGLISH.
If, therefore, you are the only person that uses that LOGIN you may well want to change the language of your LOGIN to be appropriate for yourself. Most of the European languages, including BRITISH English (because the British don't speak English Microsoft? 😒) use the format dd-MM-yyyy.
Really, however, what you should be doing is using an unambiguous date format, of which there are only 2 in SQL Server, regardless of the language setting and data type. Those 2 formats are yyyyMMdd and yyyy-MM-ddThh:mm:ss.nnnnnnn. If you are always using the newer date and time data types (so not datetime or smalldatetime), then yyyy-MM-dd( hh:mm:ss.nnnnnnn) is also unambiguous, however, as it's language specific for the older data type then I don't normally recommend it's use.
Storage wise, date and time data types don't have a format, so your column isn't "expected" a value in the format MM-dd-yyyy, as it doesn't retain the "format data" that the value was passed in. Again, the only reason why a value like 13-12-2020 is working is because your language setting, which uses mdy for date interpretation.
Two things really,
Firstly, you can control the expected date format for each connection. Before issuing the insert statement, do set dateformat dmy; or set dateformat mdy; as appropriate.
Secondly, it's always advisable to work with dates in the ISO format of YYYYMMDD, so if you insert the data '20210314' it will always be treated correctly.
Related
I have a scenario to cast string date into date format. But the date string is not in a straight format, so the conversion throws error. So what I tried is
set dateformat dmy
before the casting in sql and it worked without any issue.
But the trouble is I need this to implement in a view or function. But the disappointing part, function or view doesn't support set dateformat with which it says as side effecting operator
So how can I specify the date format of the given string before casting in a function or view?
The third parameter of CONVERT() allows to provide a format type.
Assuming your SET DATEFORMAT DMY I take you've to deal with dates like "1/2/2000", meaning the first of February in 2000.
Try this:
DECLARE #d VARCHAR(100)='1/2/2000';
SELECT CONVERT(DATE,#d,104)
The 104 is the German type with a 4-digit year. If this does not fit your needs, you can follow the link to find a better suiting format.
If you need further help, please provide samples of your actual dates.
Hint: You should always store a value in a column with the appropriate type. Storing dates as strings will make things slow and opens a lot of error sources...
As Damien wrote in his comment to the question, ideally you should not mess around with string representations of datetime in the first place - you should be using proper data types - and since you asked about creating a view, it can only mean that somewhere in your database there's a datetime value stored as a string.
The solution to this situation is to change the way you are storing this value - use DateTime2 for datetime values, Date for date-only values, or Time for time-of-day values.
Further reading - Aaron Bertrand's Bad habits to kick : choosing the wrong data type
Assuming you can't change the database design, read the rest of this answer.
You can't use set dateformat on a view or a function, but you can use convert instead of cast to change the string representation of a datetime value into an actual datetime value, assuming the string representation has one of the supported date formats (there are quite a few of them, so usually it shouldn't be a problem).
If your string representation of the datetime is in a format that is not supported by the built in convert function, you might need to do some extra work in the form of string manipulation to either change it into a supported format, or (in the harder case) separate the string representation to parts and then use datetimefromparts.
If you could provide the actual format you are using in your string representation of the datetime format I can probably edit this answer to show you exactly how to do it.
SELECT CONVERT(varchar(10),CAST('07/01/2018' AS DATE),23)
Result
2018-07-01
Not sure what you mean by, "date string is not in a straight format". Examples will help.
Have you tried parsing, instead of casting?
SELECT
TRY_PARSE(thedate AS datetime) as justParse
,TRY_PARSE(thedate AS datetime USING 'en-US') as parseUS
,TRY_PARSE(thedate AS datetime USING 'en-GB') as parseGB
,try_cast(thedate as date) as tryCast
FROM (values
('07/01/2018')
,('01/07/2018')
,('07 jan 2018')
,('jan 07 2018')
,('Monday, 7 January 2019')
)d(thedate)
I have a view in SQL Server 2012 and there is a column of containing dates×. I have been trying to convert the date column as '20/10/2018 18:00' format (no second) by using this feature and lots of approaches on Stackoverflow and other web sites:
FORMAT(StartDate, 'dd.mm.yyyy hh:mm')
However, as the data type of this column is Varchar (String) rather than DateTime, I encountered some problems in C# side and I want to perform this conversion on the database side without changing the data type of the generated format). Is there any way to achieve this?
SQL Server doesn't have a "date format" per se. The formatting of datetime fields is only performed when presenting the datetime to an output - that is, when converting it to a string.
There is a default format for presentation that is controlled by the server's collation setting. However, internally the date is stored as a numeric value (actual format varies by type, as datetime and datetime2 have different internal formats), and that value has no associated formatting.
You can store your date without seconds by using a smalldatetime field, or by manipulating the input data to trim off the seconds value. But, unless you store your date as a string, which is absolutely not recommended, you will not be able to save an output format different from the default collation-driven format in a datetime field.
I would migrate that column to a datetime (or some variant) if possible. Alternatively if that would affect too many things, you could make a computed column on the table which converts the string date you have to a datetime. That way the database doesn't have to care about the formatting at all; it just works with the proper DateTime data type.
If neither of those is an option, you can just pas the string to C# and use DateTime.TryParse() to convert it to a C# DateTime object.
In either case, it's preferable to work with the date as a DateTime up until the very last minute where you need to format it for display somewhere.
I need some help understanding date format handling in SQL Server.
If you try the following, it will return a correct result:
SET LANGUAGE English
SELECT CAST('2013-08-15' AS DATETIME)
-- 2013-08-15 00:00:00.000
This, however, will result in a conversion error because apparently SQL Server interprets '8' as the day and '15' as the month:
SET LANGUAGE German
SELECT CAST('2013-08-15' AS DATETIME)
-- Conversion failed when converting date and/or time from character string.
I know that I can use the language-independent (slightly adapted ISO-8601) format YYYYMMDD (without dashes), and it will work in any language.
I don't understand however why YYYY-MM-DD is language dependent, when SQL Books clearly says
"The interpretation depends on the combination of string literal format, ... and default language option settings. ... Some string literal formats are not affected by these settings. ... The ISO 8601 format does not depend on these settings and is an international standard."
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms180878%28v=sql.105%29.aspx
Even looking at the dateformat returned by select * from sys.syslanguages gives no indication - the date format is dmy, so it doesn't match the ISO-8601 format either.
So, the questions are:
Why is the ISO-8601 format language-dependent, even though Books Online says otherwise?
Where can I find the exact format SQL Server uses when parsing ISO-8601 dates?
UPDATE:
Reading further down on http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms180878%28v=sql.105%29.aspx#ISO8601Format, it says 'To use the ISO 8601 format, you must specify each element in the format. This includes the T, the colons (:), the + or - , and the periods (.)' (e.g. 2004-05-23T14:25:10).
The table right above (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms180878%28v=sql.105%29.aspx#StringLiteralDateandTimeFormats) says that the ISO 8601 Numeric is not DATEFORMAT dependent, but it also is not Multilanguage. I'm not sure where to find additional information about the Multilanguage part though - e.g., the exact format used in each language.
This related question might help with languages and ISO-8601 date formats.
Why is SQL Server misinterpreting this ISO 8601 format date?
See the article The ultimate guide to the datetime datatypes which was also linked in the answer for more information on the datetime types used by SQL Server.
My guess would be to maintain backwards compatibility. The new datatypes in SQL Server 2008 datetime2 and date is not dependent on SET LANGUAGE or SET DATEFORMAT. Here is a connect item that suggests to change the behaviour for datetime as well.
Hard to answer a question starting with "Why" :-)
This may not answer your question, but for dates there is one string format which will work across ALL locales: 'YYYYMMDD'
Try:
SET LANGUAGE English
SELECT CAST('20130815' AS DATETIME)
SET LANGUAGE German
SELECT CAST('20130815' AS DATETIME)
SET LANGUAGE Japanese
SELECT CAST('20130815' AS DATETIME)
This will give the expected result.
I have a value in SQL that represents a date, but it of type nvarchar. The value of the date is in the format:
dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm
I need to present this column via a view to a CCure 800 database in DATETIME format. I expected to use CAST/CONVERT; however, when using this, the following error is returned:
Msg 242, Level 16, State 3, Line 1
The conversion of a varchar data type to a datetime data type resulted in an out-of-range value.
Please stop storing dates as strings, and especially as Unicode strings. Are you concerned that some future version of our calendar will have umlauts, pound signs, hieroglyphics, or Mandarin instead of numbers?
Store dates as dates. That is what those data types are for. In addition to not having to worry about invalid interpretations, you also get all of the benefits of things like DATEPART and DATEADD, and you don't have to worry about anyone stuffing nonsense into the column (anything from 31/02/2012 to 'I don''t want to enter a real date'...
In the meantime, you just need to use a style number with CONVERT (this won't work reliably with CAST):
SELECT CONVERT(DATETIME, '13/06/2013 09:32', 103);
To make it work with CAST, you could set your LANGUAGE or DATEFORMAT settings accordingly, but you can't do this inside a view, and it makes the code very brittle anyhow IMHO.
SET DATEFORMAT DMY;
SELECT CAST('13/06/2013 09:32' AS DATETIME);
Or
SET LANGUAGE BRITISH;
SELECT CAST('13/06/2013 09:32' AS DATETIME);
By a very wide margin, I prefer the additional control CONVERT gives you, and almost unilaterally change all instances of CAST to CONVERT, even when this control is not needed, for consistency (why use CAST in some cases, and CONVERT when you need it, when you can just use CONVERT always?).
EDIT
To identify the garbage data that has snuck into your table because of a bad data type choice, do this (and then fix the data or, better yet, fix the data type so this doesn't happen again):
SET DATEFORMAT DMY;
SELECT date_column FROM dbo.table_name WHERE ISDATE(date_column) = 0;
How can I retrieve a record based on a Date property? I'm trying:
WHERE Meetings.[MDate] = '16/12/2011'
which is the format I use but I get :
"Data type mismatch in criteria expression"
Problem solved: It should have been:
WHERE Meetings.[MDate] = 16/12/2011
No quotation marks.
For where clauses use
columnName = #mm/dd/yyyy#
You'll want to use the SQL date format: '#2011-12-16#'
Use the cast to DATETIME function, CDATE(), which will honour the machine's regional settings. That said, it still a good idea to use an unambiguous date format and the ISO 8601 format is a good one.
Also note that Access doesn't have a date data type: its sole temporal data type is DATETIME and, as its name suggests, always has a time element accurate to one second time granule, even if that time happens to be midnight. Therefore, it is a good idea to always include a time value to one second time granule in all DATETIME literals e.g.
WHERE Meetings.MDate = CDATE('2011-12-16 00:00:00');
Another advantage to the above is that the Access UI will not attempt to reformat the DATETIME literal because it is held as a string.