dates

Handling Unix Timestamps in SQL Server

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Unix timestamps (also known as epoch time) are a simple way of representing a point in time: the number of seconds that have passed since 00:00:00 UTC on January 1, 1970 UTC. They’re popular in APIs, logs, and systems that need a compact, language-neutral way to store time.

If you’re working with SQL Server, you’ll almost certainly run into Unix timestamps eventually. Either you’re getting them from an external system or you need to produce them for one. Let’s walk through how to handle them in SQL Server.

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Converting Between Time Zones in SQL Server with AT TIME ZONE

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Converting between time zones in SQL Server has evolved throughout the years. Prior to SQL Server 2016, there was no simple, built-in function to handle this task. We had to use a complex, multi-step approach involving functions like SWITCHOFFSET() and TODATETIMEOFFSET(), and we had to manually account for Daylight Saving Time (DST) rules for each time zone. This method was often prone to error and required constant maintenance to keep up with changing time zone and DST regulations.

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Convert DDMMYYYY to DATE in SQL Server

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Sometimes you might get dates in a non-standard format, such as DDMMYYYY. By “non-standard” I mean a format that SQL Server doesn’t recognize as a date. Such a format is actually a little ambiguous. Some dates presented in this format could be mistaken for another date. For example, 02082026 could be August 2, 2026, or it could be February 8, 2026 depending on which locale you’re using.

Therefore, we need to do a bit of work in order to get SQL Server to recognize it as a date. Once that’s done, it’s a simple matter of converting it to an actual DATE type.

Below are a few options for converting a DDMMYYYY string to a DATE in SQL Server.

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4 Ways to Format the Current Date as MM/DD/YYYY in SQL Server

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In SQL Server, we can use functions like GETDATE() to get the current date and time. There are also other functions, like CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, SYSDATETIME(), etc. These functions return values using one of the valid date/time types. For example, GETDATE() and CURRENT_TIMESTAMP return a datetime type, while SYSDATETIME() returns a datetime2(7) value.

Either way, if we want the current date to be displayed using MM/DD/YYYY format, we’ll need to do some extra work.

Fortunately SQL Server provides us with a range of options for doing this, and so we can pick the one that suits our scenario.

With that in mind, here are four ways to format the current date as MM/DD/YYYY in SQL Server.

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Convert MMDDYYYY to DATE in SQL Server

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Sometimes we get dates in a format that SQL Server has trouble with when we try to convert them to an actual DATE value. One example would be dates in MMDDYYYY format. While it might be easy to assume that SQL Server would be able to handle this easily, when we stop to think about it, this format is fraught with danger.

The MMDDYYYY format is ambiguous. While we might know that the first two digits are for the month, SQL Server doesn’t know this. Some countries/regions use the first two digits for the day (like DDMMYYYY). So if we get a date like, 01032025, how would SQL Server know whether it’s the first day of the third month, or the third day of the first month?

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5 Functions that Extract the Month from a Date in DuckDB

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Sometimes when working with SQL databases like DuckDB, we need to return the month part from a date for presentation or for further processing. DuckDB provides us with a handful of functions that can help in this regard.

In this article, we’ll look at five different functions we can use to extract the month from a date in DuckDB.

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