Using DATEADD Instead Of DATEDIFF

Michael J. Swart points out a bit of trickery with DATEDIFF:

I assumed that the DATEDIFF function I wrote worked this way: Subtract the two dates to get a timespan value and then return the number of seconds (rounded somehow) in that timespan.

But that’s not how it works. The docs for DATEDIFF say:

“Returns the count (signed integer) of the specified datepart boundaries crossed between the specified startdate and enddate.”

There’s no rounding involved. It just counts the ticks on the clock that are heard during a given timespan.

Read the whole thing.