Question

Please help in writing a code for conversion of source data in dd/mm/yyyy format.

For Example:

**column**
02/01/2010
2/01/2010
12/11/2010
14/12/2010
01/1/2009
1/1/2008
12/31/2006

This column is a combination of mm/dd/yyyy and dd/mm/yyyy.

And I need to write a syntax in select statement (case statement) to get whatever the data format is atlast it needs to be in dd/mm/yyyy format.

Answer 1

Something like this will do what you want. Once the column is in date format you can represent it in any format you want. It’s not pretty though.

SET DATEFORMAT DMY
SELECT CASE WHEN ISDATE(yourColumn) = 1  THEN CONVERT(DATETIME, yourColumn)
            ELSE CONVERT(DATETIME, SUBSTRING(yourColumn, 
                           CHARINDEX('/', yourColumn, 0)+1, 
                           CHARINDEX('/', yourColumn, CHARINDEX('/', yourColumn, 0)+1) - CHARINDEX('/', yourColumn, 0)) 
                 + STUFF(yourColumn, 
                         CHARINDEX('/', yourColumn, 0), 
                         CHARINDEX('/', yourColumn, CHARINDEX('/', yourColumn, 0)+1) - CHARINDEX('/', yourColumn, 0), '') )
       END
FROM yourTable

This is highly fragile code though. If you can not be sure that a date is in dmy or mdy format, it is very likely you will produce incorrect results.