My gripe is more a Reporting Services thing, but it does spill over to SQL proper and it's to do with international date formats. I think there must be plenty of developers at Microsoft that don't realise that the US date format is not the only format!

The preview mode in SSRS (and RS 2000 for that matter) just can't cope with European formats (i.e. dd/mm/yyyy) if they don't look like a valid US date regardless of locale settings. It's fine when deployed, thankfully. This is a problem I've reported when beta testing previously. Date handling in SQL can be a bit hit and miss in SQL too - I'm never quite 100% certain how something like '01/03/2006' will be interpreted, despite setting locales. 1st of March or 3rd of January?

I got so paranoid at one point, that I when hard coding dates I did it as 'yyyy/mm/dd' thinking that it couldn't be mis-interpreted. But then SSIS went and treated it as 'yyyy/dd/mm' because as a UK date it assumed the day and month had to be swapped -

Cheers

Chris McGuigan