Question

I am using SQL Server 2008.

I have some dates in my database that I “think” I want to break down into smaller parts. The dates are birthdays and death days. I want to be able to output them like by querying people who were born in October or on May 12th or in 1945.

I was told that a typical way of doing this is to take a date and break it into smaller pieces and put each piece of the date into its own column, like this:

2001-03-12 00:00:00 // EventDate column

Add these columns:

2001 // EventYear column
03 // EventMonth column
12 // EventDay column

First, is this a good way of doing this? If so, second, can I somehow have SQL Server automatically break the date part and put it into its own columns?

I’d appreciate ideas and solutions.

Answer 1

I would recommend that you leave it as a date column and then use DatePart in queries to filter results.

Select * from TABLEX
where DatePart(YEAR,EventDate) = 1945