Retrieving Only the Date from a Datetime Value in SQL Server

This article discusses about retrieving only the date from a datetime value in SQL Server.

There are many times where you might need to only retrieve the date from a datetime value.

For example, you may have today’s datetime (2011-10-10 20:30:28.230) and you want to only get the following value: 2011-10-10.

Using the DATE Datatype in SQL Server 2008 and later

In SQL Server 2008 or later, you can easily do this by casting/converting the datetime value to the datatype DATE.

A typical example is the following:

--Datetime variable declaration
DECLARE @dateTimeValue as datetime
SET @dateTimeValue=GETDATE()


--Cast the datetime value to the DATE datatype
SELECT CAST(@dateTimeValue as DATE) as OnlyDate
GO

Extract the Date from Datetime in SQL Server Earlier than 2008

However, in earlier versions of SQL Server the DATE type is not available.

So, if you have a SQL Server 2005 instance or earlier and you want to get the date value from a datetime value you can just create and use a simple scalar-valued function like the following:

Now that the function is created, the first example changes to:

--Datetime variable declaration

DECLARE @dateTimeValue as datetime
SET @dateTimeValue=GETDATE()

--Get only the date value by calling the scalar-valued function
SELECT dbo.dateOnly(@dateTimeValue) as OnlyDate
GO

I hope you found the article useful!