Question

I’ve got a table with 9 million records. Each one has a “BirthDate” field that is stored as a varchar. I’m trying to select all where the birthdate is 25 years or less (all people 25 or under). It’s failing, because somewhere in this monstrosity of a table, there is an invalid value.

select COUNT(*) from LeadSplit where CAST(LeadSplit.Birthdate as datetime) > DATEADD(yy, -26, getdate())  and Birthdate is not null 

The error is:

Msg 242, Level 16, State 3, Line 1
The conversion of a varchar data type to a datetime data type resulted in an out-of-range value.

I’m at a loss as to how to find the row with the invalid value, and also, how to deal with it. I would like to just ignore it or fix it.

Answer 1

You could try to find the offending rows by doing something like:

SELECT (some ID), Birthdate
FROM dbo.YourTable
WHERE ISDATE(Birthdate) = 0

This might not work for all cases – but it might give you a starting point.