You will want to use the YYYYMMDD for unambiguous date determination in SQL Server.
insert into table1(approvaldate)values(‘20120618 10:34:09 AM’);
If you are married to the dd-mm-yy hh:mm:ss xm format, you will need to use CONVERT with the specific style.
insert into table1 (approvaldate)
values (convert(datetime,’18-06-12 10:34:09 PM’,5));
5 here is the style for Italian dates. Well, not just Italians, but that’s the culture it’s attributed to in Books Online.
A more language-independent choice for string literals is the international standard ISO 8601 format “YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss”. I used the SQL query below to test the format, and it does indeed work in all SQL languages in sys.syslanguages:
declare @sql nvarchar(4000)
declare @LangID smallint
declare @Alias sysname
declare @MaxLangID smallint
select @MaxLangID = max(langid) from sys.syslanguages
set @LangID = 0
while @LangID <= @MaxLangID
begin
select @Alias = alias
from sys.syslanguages
where langid = @LangID
if @Alias is not null
begin
begin try
set @sql = N'declare @TestLang table (langdate datetime)
set language ''' + @alias + N''';
insert into @TestLang (langdate)
values (''2012-06-18T10:34:09'')'
print 'Testing ' + @Alias
exec sp_executesql @sql
end try
begin catch
print 'Error in language ' + @Alias
print ERROR_MESSAGE()
end catch
end
select @LangID = min(langid)
from sys.syslanguages
where langid > @LangID
end
According to the String Literal Date and Time Formats section in Microsoft TechNet, the standard ANSI Standard SQL date format “YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss” is supposed to be “multi-language”. However, using the same query, the ANSI format does not work in all SQL languages.
For example, in Danish, you will many errors like the following:
Error in language Danish
The conversion of a varchar data type to a datetime data type resulted in an out-of-range value.
If you want to build a query in C# to run on SQL Server, and you need to pass a date in the ISO 8601 format, use the Sortable “s” format specifier:
string.Format(“select convert(datetime2, ‘{0:s}'”, DateTime.Now);