Date Manipulation

External Article

How to Get SQL Server Dates and Times Horribly Wrong

  • Article

One of the times that you need things to go right is when you are doing analysis and reporting. This is generally based on time and date. A sure-fire way of getting managers upset is to get the figures horribly wrong by messing up the way that you handle datetime values in SQL Server. In the interests of peace, harmony and a long career in BI, Robert Sheldon outlines some of the worst mistakes you can make when using SQL Server dates.

2015-06-08

7,158 reads

External Article

On Handling Dates in SQL

  • Article

The handling of dates in TSQL is complex - when SQL Server was Sybase, it was forced by the lack of prevailing standards in SQL to create its own ways of processing and formatting dates and times. Joe Celko looks forward to a future when it is possible to write standard SQL date-processing code with SQL Server.

2014-03-21

7,283 reads

Blogs

Goodbye, Microsoft

By

A few years ago I took a new job at Microsoft, working as a...

The SUM of Nothing: #SQLNewBlogger

By

I caught this interesting item over on Pinal Dave’s blog: Eleven Interview Questions that...

How to Move the SSMS Status Bar to the Top and Color-Code SQL Server Connections

By

I use color-coded connections in SSMS to distinguish Production, Pre-Production, UAT, and Development. But...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

Today's AI

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Today's AI

Split Large Queries in Athena with a Simple Modulo Trick

By Rahul Gupta

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Split Large Queries in Athena...

Finding Trailing Spaces

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Finding Trailing Spaces

Visit the forum

Question of the Day

Finding Trailing Spaces

I have some data in a SQL Server 2025 database. It looks like this for the dbo.Customer table:

CustomerID CustomerName PreferredName
1          Steve        Steve               
2          Andy         Andy               
3          Brian        Brian               
4          Allan        Allan               
5          Devin        Devin               
6          Steve        Steve               
7          Sally        Sally
I want to detect which names have a single trailing space. The CustomerName is a varchar() and the PreferredName is a CHAR(). Does this query detect the problem rows?
SELECT 
       CustomerID,
       CustomerName,
       PreferredName
FROM Customer
WHERE CustomerName <> RTRIM(CustomerName)
OR PreferredName <> RTRIM(PreferredName);

See possible answers