T-SQL 101: 75 Constructing dates and times in SQL Server using DATEFROMPARTS

I mentioned in previous T-SQL posts that one of the challenges is that there’s no standard way to write dates, so we end up having to write them as strings. Now that was a real problem in earlier versions where people would get that wrong. The DATEFROMPARTS() function added in SQL Server 2012, though, can help with this:

This query takes the year 2019, the month 2, and the day 28 and returns a date:

All of the date related data types have options with FROMPARTS. So for example there’s a DATETIMEFROMPARTS(), a DATETIMEOFFSETFROMPARTS(), etc.

Sadly, though, at the time of writing, the Intellisense for these in SSMS is very poor. Currently it doesn’t tell you what each parameter is. That’s not good.

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2020-06-22