When using SQL Server, you have a few different options when you need to return the month name from a date using T-SQL. By month name, I’m not talking about the month number (such as 07). I’m talking about the full name of the month (such as July).
For example, when given a date of 2018-07-01, you want July to be returned.
This article presents three ways to return the month name from a date in SQL Server using T-SQL.
When you connect to SQL Server, usually the date format is determined by your language. The default language for a session is the language for that session’s login, unless overridden on a per-session basis by using the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) or OLE DB APIs.
The date format setting affects the interpretation of character strings as they are converted to date values for storage in the database. It does not affect the display of date data type values that are stored in the database or the storage format.
Despite the fact that the your session’s language determines the date format, you can override the date format if required. For example, if your language is us_english, the date format will be mdy (so that 07/01/2018 represents the 1st of July and not the 7th of January). You can change this so that the date format is dmy (or any other format) while the language remains us_english.
You can use T-SQL to explicitly set the date format of the current session by using the SET DATEFORMAT statement.
When using SQL Server, your current connection includes a number of options that determine things like the language, date formats, etc. These could be set at whatever the default is, but they can also be overridden during the session by using a SET statement.
The date format affects the interpretation of character strings as they are converted to date values for storage in the database. When the language is set using SET LANGUAGE, the date format setting is implicitly set accordingly. This can be explicitly overridden with the SET DATEFORMAT statement.
In any case, you can find the current date format by using the DBCC USEROPTIONS command. This command returns the SET options that have been set for the current connection.
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.