death to sql server (part 4)

I’ve written about this before, but to rehash … the date functions inside SQL server suck. What’s really weird is that there’s an undocumented way to retrieve out certain datetime formats, and even that is inconsistent in its numbering scheme.

The way to pull them out is by running “SELECT CONVERT(VARCHAR, GETDATE(), @x);” where @x is a positive integer. If you can find the right integer, you can save time and pull out something directly like ’11-10-2006′ as your variable.

One of the problems you’ll run into though is that you can’t just do 1 through $integer. Only some of them return something, and the ones that don’t just throw an SQL error, so you get to hunt down which integers return something.

Well, digging for them manually once is something I don’t want to repeat, so I wrote a query statement to pull out some of them. This could be a handy reference inside your database somewhere.

DECLARE @x int;
SET @x = 1;
WHILE @x 0 AND (@x 20 AND @x <25) OR (@x > 99 AND @x < 115) OR @x IN(126,130,131)) BEGIN
SELECT @x, CONVERT(VARCHAR, GETDATE(), @x);
END
SELECT @x = (@x +1);
END