i have an old database that I'm converting from Access to MS SQL Server 2008. In the Access database, dates were written as 02/2008 so MM/YYYY. I want to convert this to a DATE type, where I can show something like MM/DD/YYYY. Is there any way to do that using SQL Server? When I tried CONVERT, it fails beacuse there are some irregular dates, such a
1/2008
01/2004
/2001
/4
etc
so my thought is that I will just write up some code to go through each date and use regex to convert it, and then save it back to the database in a new table.
Any thoughts on how to make this easier?
Looks like your only choice here is some sort of string manipulation like you've proposed. What part of the process would you like to make easier?
Related
I was trying to convert one of my MS Access query containing format to a SQL Server view. I have my view connected to MS Access as linked tables. I was looking at this MS Access to SQL server cheat-sheet to convert Jet-SQL to T-SQL.
The cheat sheet says:
Access: SELECT Format(Value, FormatSpecification) (note: this
always returns a string value)
T-SQL: Do not do this in T-SQL;
format data at your front-end application or report
I cannot format data at my front end because the SQL Server view is linked as linked tables. I cannot have format function in tables.
The cheat sheet does not provide any explanation on why not to do this in T-SQL.
What is the reason behind not using format when converting Jet-SQL to T-SQL?
Obviously, you can format values in T-SQL using the Format function, which only has minor differences with the Access format function.
Generally, though, you shouldn't.
There are multiple reasons why it's discouraged:
Formatted strings are nearly always larger than unformatted dates/numbers, causing additional overhead when transmitting results
If you format in the application layer, the unformatted value is available to you in the application layer to validate/do calculations with/use for conditional formatting/etc. If you format in the data in the database layer, you can't do this without casting back to a date (which is a really bad practice).
If you want variable formatting based on things like locale settings, it's way easier to format in the application layer.
It's certainly not a limitation of SQL Server. It's just a bad practice to use it.
Our business would be providing us a .csv file. One of the columns in the file would be in date format. Now as we know there are many date formats in Excel. The problem is that we need to check whether the date provided is a correct date. It could be in any format like ddmmyyyy, yyyymmdd, dd-mon-yyyy etc basically any format that Excel supports.
We are planning to first load the data in a staging area and the date field would be defined as varchar so that it can accept any data.
Now either using SSIS or via T-SQL, I need to check whether the date provided is actually a date and if it is I need to load it into a different table in YYYYMMDD format.
How do I go about doing the above?
Considering you have your excel data already loaded into a SQL Server table as varchar (you can easily do this using SSIS), something like this would work:
SELECT
case when ISDATE(YOUR_DATE) = 1 then CONVERT(int,YOUR_DATE,112) else null end as MyDate
FROM
YOUR_TABLE
I don't have access to a SQL Server instance at the moment and can't test the code above, so you may need to adapt to your needs, but this is the general idea.
You can also do further research on ISDATE and CONVERT functions in SQL Server. You should be able to achieve what you need combining them together.
I am exporting data from Excel to SQL Server through an API. Everything is supposed to save as nvarchar but date is stored as int value (automatically). How can I keep, in SQL table, date value as it is i.e. like 01/01/1990 instead of 32874.
Might be a basic question, Googled and looked into SO but couldn't find what I am after yet. Help appreciated!
In SQL Server, you can convert to a date by using:
select dateadd(day, 32874, '1899-12-31')
There is probably also a way to fix this when importing the data, by treating it as an actual date or string.
I have the following query in MS Access and needs to be converted to SQL Server. I am trying to understand what does the format function do here and what is the use of "0".
SELECT Format([SumOfTotalPopulation],"0") AS Expr1 , SumOfTotalPopulation FROM
qry_ASSET_STREAM_DS_POP_PROP ;
Can anyone help me understad this. The above code is present in MS Access 2003 and Im working on SQL Server 2008 R2.
In your case, Format([SumOfTotalPopulation],"0") just removes the decimals from the number.
In SQL Server, you could use something like Str(sumOfTotalPopulation,12,0)
Or you could use Round()
The Access Format() function behaves differently based on the data type passed into it. In this example, I'm assuming that your SumOfTotalPopulation field is a number, which means that the formatting will be done as described here - basically, it will be formatted as an integer - no decimal point, no thousands separator.
The good news for you is that if the field in SQL Server is already defined as an integer type, you won't have to do this formatting. Otherwise, you should be doing this formatting at the presentation layer (user interface, web page, report, etc.) and not in the query itself.
Access teaches a lot of bad habits. Rather than translate what you have in Access one-for-one, take this opportunity to update things to be done "the SQL Server way" wherever possible.
I'm using EF with SQL Server and when I'm fetching a DateTime field that is DateTime on the MSSQL and on EF, I would get something like this:
"UpdateTime":"\/Date(1358716865533+0200)\/"
I have no idea what format is this (only that it shows some time with GMT+2 offset).
Any suggestions?
Second, I've tried to use ToString("") on that fields inside the LINQ that fetches the records and got an error that SQL doesn't support formatting this way - so I have no easy way to format that date as I want.
Is there any way to apply formatting?
Thanks!
As said in the comment, this is a Unix format. You'll get a similar string when you serialize a DateTime with JavaScriptSerializer (JSON).
As for your second question. Yes it can be a nuisance that EF does not allow ToString in linq queries. On the other hand, EF is for data access, formatting is for UI. So you better do the formatting after you've fetched data from the database into memory display them somewhere.