When working with dates in SQL Server, it’s easy to get tripped up with different date formats. For example, someone from the US might consider 01/07/2018 to mean the 7th of January, but someone from the UK might consider it to mean the 1st of July.
In many cases you might not even know which date format is used for any particular language/culture. Fortunately, SQL Server stores this information in its resource database, and you can retrieve it by using either of the two methods below.
The following is a list of all languages installed with the SQL Server 2017 database engine. This includes the language, along with its associated date formats.
This list can be returned by executing the sp_helplanguage stored procedure, or by querying the sys.syslanguages view directly. The list below contains the column names and their corresponding values for each language.
When a new login is created in SQL Server, it is assigned a default language. This language is used for system messages and date/time formats. This language will be used as the default language whenever that login connects to SQL Server (but it can also be changed to a different language within the session).
If you ever wish to find out the language that’s assigned to the current session, you can run one of the options on this page.
In SQL Server, you can set the language to be used for the current session. The current language setting determines the language used on all system messages, as well as the date/time formats to use.
This article demonstrates how to use T-SQL to set the current language environment in SQL Server.
Perhaps you’ve encountered the T-SQL PARSE(), CAST(), and CONVERT() functions when working with SQL Server and wondered what the difference is. All three functions seem to do the same thing, but there are subtle differences between them.
In this article I aim to outline the main differences between these functions.
In SQL Server, the PARSE() and TRY_PARSE() functions are used for translating a value into another data type. They essentially do the same thing, with one exception; how they deal with errors.
If PARSE() fails when attempting to parsing to a different data type, it will return an error. If TRY_PARSE() fails, it will return NULL.
If you need to convert a string into a date/time value in SQL Server, you have a number of options. In this post I outline six T-SQL functions that allow you to do this.
The six functions are:
CAST()CONVERT()PARSE()TRY_CAST()TRY_CONVERT()TRY_PARSE()Below are example of how you can use these functions to convert a string to a date/time data type.
If you work with SQL Server, chances are you’ve used at least one of the CONVERT() or CAST() functions to convert from one data type to another. If you’ve ever encountered an error while trying to convert a string to a date/time data type, the PARSE() function could be what you need.
For example, if you have a string like say, Fri, 20 Jul 2018, the CONVERT() or CAST() functions will throw an error. But the PARSE() function will handle it without a problem.
The PARSE() function returns the result of an expression, translated to the requested data type in SQL Server. So you can use it to “translate” your string value into a date/time data type (such as date, datetime, datetime2, etc).
When using SQL Server, you can convert a date/time value into a string by using the CONVERT() function. This function allows you to convert between different data types.
In this article, we’ll be converting between various date/time data types to a varchar or nvarchar string.
One of the good things about this function is that it allows you to specify the style that the date will be returned in. For example, you can specify whether it’s returned as mm/dd/yyyy, yyyy.mm.dd, Mon dd, yyyy, etc. You can also specify whether the time component is returned and how it’s styled.
The CONVERT() function allows you to convert between data types. It’s similar to the CAST() function, but one of the benefits of CONVERT() is that, when you convert from a date/time data type to a string, you can add an optional argument that specifies the style that you want the return value to be in. For example, you can have it returned as dd.mm.yyyy, yyyy-mm-dd, dd mon yyyy, etc
This article contains examples of the various styles you can return when converting a date/time value to a string using the CONVERT() function in SQL Server.