In the world of Application and DB Development there is always a need to display dates in a format that is understandable to your audience.  For example, in the US we normally expect to see a date as mm/dd/yyyy; however, in Great Britain, the normal format is dd/mm/yyyy.  The Convert function in SQL Server provides a means to translate SQL Server’s default date format to just about any format.

The syntax for the Convert function is as follows:

CONVERT ( data_type [ ( length ) ] , expression [ , style ] )

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Available Date Formats --

Source Code

It shows some of the different ways dates can be formatted and produces the result below.

 

Below are a few resources that I found on using the Convert function.

• Working with SQL Server Date/Time Variables – DataBase Journal
• Working with SQL Server Date/Time Variables: Part Two – Displaying Dates and Times in Different Formats – DataBase Journal
• What the format codes mean in SQL ‘CONVERT’ – DBForums
• HOWTO – Compare a date string to datetime in SQL Server? – StackOverflow
• How to convert DateTime to VarChar – StackOverflow
• Sql Server string to date conversion – StackOverflow

I also posted a while back about Handling Dates in SQL Server.

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Happy Learning!