T-SQL 101: 60 Finding names of date and time components in SQL Server T-SQL

In an earlier post, I showed how you could extract the year, month, day, etc. from dates. But these came back as numbers. So instead of “March”, I got 3 returned.

Sometimes though, I want the name of the period, not the number.

Look at this query:

And you can see what it returns here:

This looks easy, but what if I’m not speaking English? It’s important to understand that functions like DATENAME are affected by the regional/language settings that you are currently using in your session.

If I had Spanish settings, I’d see the name in Spanish instead.

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2020-03-09