Hugo Kornelis (9/1/2010)

---

Oleg Netchaev (9/1/2010)

---

...

select dateadd(day, datediff(day, 0, current_timestamp), 0);

Why faster is because how datetime is stored internally (4 bytes for number of days from zero date and 4 bytes for number of ticks from midnight of today).

The reason I use a date in the 'yyyymmdd' format instead of an integer value is because it's easier for the eye (assuming an eye that is somewhat used to this format) to interpret as a date. As a matter of principle, I always use 'yyyymmdd' for date constants in my code. I would never dream of using the integer constant 40421 to represent Sep 1st, 2010 (and I hope noone would even consider that), even though it does indeed convert to datetime faster than the string constant '20100901'. And I don't like to make an exception for representing the date Jan 1st, 1900.

But I do agree that it's quite common to use 0 in this particular construction, and that it does not really hurt.:-)