Question

The task:

I need to count every record in a table that was added after 07/01/2011.

Info:

There is a column in the table “Date_added” which is formatted as varchar and contains dates in format mm/dd/yyyy.

What I’ve tried:

I tried the following query:

SELECT count(date_added) FROM Abatements_Doc WHERE date_added >= '07/01/2011'

Unfortunately it counted any date where the month was greater than 07 regardless of the year or day. I’m at a loss as to how I should format my query to get it to read the dates properly instead of by ascii sort. In my research I discovered the CAST and CONVERT options, but am not sure how to use them, or which one I should use if any. I’m extremely new to SQL, and want to make sure I don’t mess up the data in the table. I just need to get the count as specified above without altering the data in the table in any way. Any help in this regard will be very much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I didn’t test. But try convert statement.

SELECT count(date_added) 
FROM Abatements_Doc 
WHERE convert(datetime,date_added,1) >= convert(datetime,'07/01/2011',1)