Re: Date formats - what do other people use??

"Tony Rogerson" <tonyrogerson@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:fmku04$561$1$8300dec7@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> In Microsoft SQL Server unfortunetly the only consistent date format is
> YYYYMMDD, this is legacy from Sybase original code apparently; using
> YYYY-MM-DD is converted as YYYY-DD-MM in many localised SQL Server
installs
> (us_english is fine, other languages even British aren't).
>
> What formats do other people use? Presumeably ISO 8601 (of course), but
is
> the normal consensus YYYYMMDD or the display friendly YYYY-MM-DD which
we
> cannot use reliably in SQL Server.
>
> I guess my absolute question is - do most databases sup****t YYYYMMDD so
when
> it comes to ****tability there is no problems?
>
> Background:
>
http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/tonyrogerson/archive/2008/01/05/date-format-inconsistency-yyyy-mm-dd-or-yyyymmdd-when-2007-04-10-is-4th-october.aspx
>
> Tony.
>
> -- 
> Tony Rogerson, SQL Server MVP
> http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/tonyrogerson
> [Ramblings from the field from a SQL consultant]
> http://sqlserverfaq.com
> [UK SQL User Community]
>
>

A format I've seen several times is YYYY.MM.DD

The use of periods instead of hyphens helps disambiguate it from
YYYY-DD-MM.

Another:  MM-DD-YYYY.

Another:  DD-MON-YYYY  eg.  17-DEC-2007 uses month names instead of
numbers.

I'm not endorsing any of these.  I'm just saying I've seen them.

One test for me is to see what the "table data im****t"  wizard in MS
Access
does with the format.  If the wizard figures out that the item is a date,
and converts all the dates correctly,  that's one argument in favor of the
format.