In SQL Server, you can find out the default language for a given user by querying the sys.server_principals system catalog view.
This view contains a row for every server-level principal. It contains information such as the principal’s name, type, create/modify date, default database, default language, etc. A principal is an entity that can request SQL Server resources.
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.
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-SQLÂ to set the current language environment in SQL Server.
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.
In SQL Server, you can use use the CONVERT() function to convert a date value from one date data type to another (or between any other data type for that matter). However, that’s not the only function in the T-SQL toolbox for converting between data types.
The CAST() function is part of the ANSI SQL standard, and it does most of the things CONVERT() does. So in many cases, you have the option of which of these functions you prefer to use.
Many database professionals prefer CAST() due to the fact that it’s part of the ANSI SQL standard, however, others prefer CONVERT() due to the extra functionality that T-SQL’s implementation offers (such as being able to provide a date style).
In any case, this article provides examples of converting between different date formats using CAST().
Sometimes when working with databases and other programming environments, you get a date value but it’s in the wrong format/data type. For example, if a date has been generated with an inbuilt date function, it might include both the date and the time, right down to the last nanosecond. And all you want is the day, month, and year, say like this: 2018-01-01.
If this happens while you’re using SQL Server, you can use the CONVERT() function to convert it to another data type. When you do this, the data type will determine the format it appears as.
This article provides examples of using the CONVERT() function in SQL Server to convert a date value to another (date) data type.
In SQL Server, you can use the CAST() function to convert an expression of one data type to another. This function works almost the same as the CONVERT() function, except that the syntax is slightly different (and CAST() doesn’t accept the style argument).
So if you need to convert a string to a date/time value, you can use the CONVERT() function or the CAST() function.
And if you get an error while using those two functions, the PARSE() function might be just what you need.
This article contains examples using the CAST() function.