I learned something here - I expected it to fail because I thought datetime2 literals were required to specify time to the second (or more precisely), so I got it wrong.

However, the explanation is complete nonsense: there is no imaginable way that something expressing dates in the Gregorian calendar would fail to recognise 9th September 1752, just because some countries didn't at that time use the Gregorian calendar - most of the civilised world (all of the civilised world except Scotland and Ireland, who were unfortunately controlled by the uncivilised English :laugh:) adopted the Gregorian calendar well before that date, but even if no-one had yet adopted it the SQL type is not intended to express anything other than Gregorian dates. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb677335%28v=SQL.100%29.aspx explicitly states that the calendar for datetime2 is Gregorian. It is utterly irrelevant that the benighted English (and their American colonies) called that day the 28th of August, in the Gregorian calendar and hence in datetime2 that day is called the 9th of September.