DATEFROMPARTS

Aaron Bertrand looks at the DATEFROMPARTS function in SQL Server 2012 and later:

The point of these functions is to make it easier to construct a date, or datetime, or datetime2 variable, when you know the individual parts. DATEFROMPARTS() takes three arguments: year, month, and day, and returns adate value. So, for example, SELECT DATEFROMPARTS(2016,7,6); would yield the date 2016-07-06.

Read on for a comparison of this function against about a dozen other methods of building dates from components.