Question

I have a sql query that returns names, appended with the current date-time, with a period/full stop used as separator. For example, the results might look like this:

John.2010-10-9
Richard.2012-1-11
John.2011-1-1

What I want to keep is

John
Richard

How can I accomplish this? Thanks for looking.

Answer 1

Try this,

SELECT DISTINCT SUBSTRING(columnName,1,(CHARINDEX('.', columnName) - 1))
FROM tableName

SQLFiddle Demo