Languages, date formats, CONVERT() and CAST()

Question

Working in a culture which uses dd/mm/yyyy date formats can lead to some peculiar problems when using US-centric software. Past experience with this problem lead me to consistently express date values as yyyy-mm-dd for SQLServer. I was under the impression that this was a foolproof, culture-neutral technique and until now I have not had any problem with it.

Today I encountered a peculiar problem with casting or converting date-strings when different language settings are applied.

This is OK.

SET LANGUAGE 'us_english'
SELECT CAST('2010-7-13' AS DATETIME)

Whereas these two fail with the message: The conversion of a char data type to a datetime data type resulted in an out-of-range datetime value.

SET LANGUAGE 'British'
SELECT CAST('2010-7-13' AS DATETIME)

SET LANGUAGE 'Italian'
SELECT CAST('2010-7-13' AS DATETIME)

Even stranger is that this succeeds

SET LANGUAGE 'British'
SELECT CONVERT(DATETIME,'2010-7-13',101)

But this fails

SET LANGUAGE 'British'
SELECT CONVERT(DATETIME,'2010-7-13')

Can anyone explain what is going on here?

Answer 1

0

If you took out the Hyphens in the date format it would work. See this URL for a list of Date formats and multi language compatability http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms180878.aspx.

Also see here for multi language TSQL statements. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms191307.aspx. It basically says that you need to specify the style parameters with a convert statement

answered Jul 12 '10 at 08:38 PM

Daniel Ross
2.9k ● 6 ● 10 ● 12

Thanks Daniel. Very interesting. Once again my firmly-held assumptions are proved invalid.

Jul 12 '10 at 10:53 PM msharp

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Languages, date formats, CONVERT() and CAST()

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