Question

I am using MS SQLServer and trying to insert a month/year combination to a table like this:

INSERT INTO MyTable VALUES (1111, 'item_name', '9/1998')

apparently, the above command cannot work since

Conversion failed when converting date and/or time from character string.

Because 9/1998 is a bad format. I want to fix this and this column of the table will show something like:

9/1998
12/1998
(other records with month/year format) 
...

Can someone help me with this?

thank you

Answer 1

SQL Server only supports full dates (day, month, and year) or datetimes, as you can see over on the MSDN data type list: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff848733(v=sql.105).aspx

You can use a date value with a bogus day or store the value as a string, but there’s no native type that just stores month/year pairs.