Question

One of our user did an insert statement in development server. The insert worked fine. However, when the same insert statement is executed in production server, he encountered the error below:

Error:.Net SqlClient Data Provider Error Message: The conversion of
char data type to a datetime data type resulted in an out-of-range
datetime value. The statement has been terminated.

The insert statement is below:

Insert into tbl_SeatWave_customers (Title
                                   ,FirstName
                                   ,Lastname
                                   ,EmailAddress
                                   ,HomeTelephone
                                   ,Address1
                                   ,Address2
                                   ,Address3
                                   ,Town
                                   ,County
                                   ,Postcode
                                   ,BuyerOrSeller
                                   ,OrderID
                                   ,ListingID
                                   ,BestCallDateTimeFrom
                                   ,bestcalldatetimeto
                                   ,FAQAsked
                                   ,Comments
                                   ,CallOutcome
                                   ,Spare1
                                   ,Spare2
                                   ) 
Values('Mr'
      ,'Darren'
      ,'Piper'
      ,'[e-mail]'
      ,'07825758328'
      ,'7 RUSSELL ROAD'
      ,''
      ,''
      ,''
      ,'CLWYD'
      ,'LL18 3BS'
      ,'Other'
      ,''
      ,'19/06/2009'
      ,'12:00'
      ,''
      ,'Callers tickets have not yet arrived.'
      ,'Resolved'
      ,'Yes'
      ,''
      )

The table tbl_SeatWave_customers has the following structure:

COLUMN_NAME           DATA_TYPE COLUMN_DEFAULT
NUID                  bigint    NULL
CallDateTime          datetime  (getdate())
Title                 nvarchar  NULL
FirstName             nvarchar  NULL
LastName              nvarchar  NULL
EmailAddress          nvarchar  NULL
HomeTelephone         nvarchar  NULL
MobileTelephone       nvarchar  NULL
WorkTelephone         nvarchar  NULL
Address1              nvarchar  NULL
Address2              nvarchar  NULL
Address3              nvarchar  NULL
Address4              nvarchar  NULL
Town                  nvarchar  NULL
County                nvarchar  NULL
Postcode              nvarchar  NULL
BuyerOrSeller         nvarchar  NULL
OrderID               nvarchar  NULL
ListingID             nvarchar  NULL
BestCallDateTimeFrom  datetime  NULL
BestCallDateTimeTo    datetime  NULL
FAQAsked              nvarchar  NULL
Comments              nvarchar  NULL
Spare1                nvarchar  NULL
Spare2                nvarchar  NULL
Spare3                nvarchar  NULL
Spare4                nvarchar  NULL
Spare5                nvarchar  NULL
CallOutcome           nvarchar  NULL

My question what is the cause of this error and what is the resolution to fix it?

Answer 1

Your date literal ’19/06/2009′ may be interpreted as style 101,US,mm/dd/yyyy or style 103,British/French,dd/mm/yyyy. 19 is not a valid “numeric month”, so my guess is your development server is set to british/french (19/06/2009 => Fri, 19 Jun 2009) and your production server to u.s. styles/formats (19/06/2009 => error).

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms180878.aspx#UsingDateandTimeFormats says:

String literal formats affect the presentation of data in applications to users but not the underlying integer storage format in SQL Server. However, SQL Server might interpret a date value in a string literal format, input by an application or user for storage or to a date function, as different dates. The interpretation depends on the combination of string literal format, data type, and runtime SET DATEFORMAT, SET LANGUAGE and default language option settings.

and

We recommend that you use date-time formats that are not DATEFORMAT dependent and are multilanguage. The ISO 8601 formats, ‘1998-02-23T14:23:05’ and ‘1998-02-23T14:23:05-08:00’ are the only formats that are an international standard. They are not DATEFORMAT or default login language dependent and are multilanguage.