Good point about sorting when date is stored in character datatype. I used to get various date points (i.e. first day of month, last day, etc...) by stripping the Year(), Month() and then stringing it back together, however I found this EXCELLENT article which generates all of these date points by strictly using built-in T-SQL functions. For example the last day of the month is: select dateadd(ms,-3,DATEADD(mm, DATEDIFF(m,0,getdate()  )+1, 0)), and of course you will commonly substitute a variable for the getdate() call here. Anyway read the article, the author has all the date points you will need: http://www.databasejournal.com/features/mssql/article.php/3076421