Question

A stupid third-party software that we use stores datetime as varchar for some good old reason and I need to parse it as sql datetime. Problem is, when the string is in mm/dd/yy format plain CAST() as datetiem works fine but my data is formatted as dd/mm/yy and CAST throws a

The conversion of a varchar data type to a datetime data type resulted
in an out-of-range value.

exception. Tips on doing it with CONVERT or CAST without using RIGHT()/LEFT() etc?

Thanks

Answer 1

One option would be to use SQL Server’s SET DATEFORMAT setting before performing the conversions. e.g.

-- Set date format to day/month/year.
SET DATEFORMAT dmy;
GO

DECLARE @datevar datetime2 = '31/12/2008 09:01:01.1234567';
SELECT @datevar;
GO