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Annoying Date Formats

Published 2017-07-13 by Kevin Feasel

Randolph West shows that even The Best Date Format can deceive you under certain circumstances:

Look carefully. DATE and DATETIME2 are showing the date of 12 July 2017 as expected. Unfortunately, the DATETIME and SMALLDATETIME data types are showing a date of 7 December 2017.

That’s not good at all. It means that the ISO 8601 standard does not work the way we might expect it to. The reason is simple, if annoying: we need to add a time to the date to make it pass the ISO 8601 standard.

I don’t like the idea of having to write 20170713 instead of 2017-07-13, but that is the only date format in SQL Server that I’ve run across that will work with any language and culture settings.

Published in Dates and Numbers

2 Comments

  1. John Spencer
    John Spencer 2017-07-17

    Yes, I (along with many others [I am sure], have run into this thing of ‘annoying’ date formats. The ‘tried and true for me has also been the YYYYDDMM format. And when including the time–using the 24 hour time format of HHMMSS has also been the ‘only’ way I have been able to have things work as expected.
    Yes, I have made ‘assumptions’ in the past — and have been burned. Thus, that absolutely fitting ‘annoyance’ word.

    Good article for the ‘unwary’

  2. Ed Eaglehouse
    Ed Eaglehouse 2017-07-18

    Yet another example of Microsoft’s disrespect for standards, to the detriment of its customers. The ISO-8601 standard works; Microsoft just didn’t implement it correctly, as usual.

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