Home Forums SQL Server 2005 SQL Server Newbies Last Day of any Month RE: Last Day of any Month

  • September 4, 2009 at 10:16 pm

    #1049666

    Steve Thompson (9/3/2009)

    However, I have one question. This method is contingent on the ability to cast the value 0 as a datetime = 01/01/1900, and -1 as 12/31/1899. Is this a stable standard (pardon the alliteration)? In other words, is it possible that MS could change something in the way they process dates that would cause this to break?

    Sure they could change the standard for date serial numbers... it would cause Excel, SQL Server, and a whole bunch of other MS products to break, though. They probably won't spend the money to change it for any reason because they spent enough to make it work correctly for Y2k and to fix the old bug that made the last day of Feb 1900 the 29th. 1900 wasn't a leap year.

    Since SQL Server 2008 follows the same "base date serial number" scheme, I'd bet that you're pretty safe another decade or two. 🙂

    --Jeff Moden

    RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
    First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
    ________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

    Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.

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