Question

I’ve got a list of data with timestamps that are missing years, the purpose of the data is for forecasting, so we’ll just tack on the year going forward, but how can I store these strings as dates?

They follow the following format:

01 Jan

02 Jan

…

31 Jan

I thought SQL would automatically convert them, with the minimum year and time, but its throwing a conversion failed error. Any ideas? I’m not an sql guy, so I’m stumped.

more info

I have a requirement to store these in an existing table, one that has a datetime column for timestamps, otherwise I would simply store these as strings and do the conversion in the UI.

Answer 1

You can do this

select CAST('01 Jan ' + CAST(YEAR(GETDATE()) AS VARCHAR) As datetime)

or

select CAST(columnname + ' ' + CAST(YEAR(GETDATE()) AS VARCHAR) As datetime)
FROm TableName