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DATEPART (SQL)

A date/time function that returns an integer representing the value of the specified part of a date/time expression.

Synopsis

DATEPART(datepart,date-expression)

Arguments

Argument Description
datepart The type of date/time information to return. The name (or abbreviation) of a date or time part. This name can be specified in uppercase or lowercase, with or without enclosing quotes. The datepart can be specified as a literal or a host variable.
date-expression A date, time, or timestamp expression from which the datepart value is to be returned. date-expression must contain a value of type datepart.

Description

The DATEPART function returns the datepart information about a specified date/time expression as data type Integer. The one exception is sqltimestamp (sts), whichreturns as data type %Library.Timestamp. To return datepart information as a character string, use DATENAME.

DATEPART returns the value of only one element of date-expression; to return a string containing multiple date parts, use TO_DATE.

This function can also be invoked from ObjectScript using the DATEPART()Opens in a new tab method call:

$SYSTEM.SQL.Functions.DATEPART(datepart,date-expression)

DATEPART is provided for Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server compatibility.

Datepart Argument

The datepart argument can be one of the following date/time components, either the full name (the Date Part column) or its abbreviation (the Abbreviation column). These datepart component names and abbreviations are not case-sensitive.

Date Part Abbreviations Return Values
year yyyy, yy 0001-9999
quarter qq, q 1-4
month mm, m 1-12
week wk, ww 1-53
weekday dw, w 1-7 (Sunday,...,Saturday)
dayofyear dy, y 1-366
day dd, d 1-31
hour hh, h 0-23
minute mi, n 0-59
second ss, s 0-59
millisecond ms 0-999 (with precision of 3)
microsecond mcs 0–999999 (with precision of 6)
nanosecond ns 0–999999999 (with precision of 9)
sqltimestamp sts SQL_TIMESTAMP: yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss

The preceding table shows the default return values for the various date parts. You can modify the returned values for several of these date parts by using the SET OPTION command with various time and date options.

week: InterSystems IRIS can be configured to determine the week of the year for a given date using either the InterSystems IRIS default algorithm or the ISO 8601 standard algorithm. For further details, refer to the WEEK function.

weekday: The InterSystems IRIS default for weekday is to designate Sunday as first day of the week (weekday=1). However, you can configure the first day of the week to another value, or you can apply the ISO 8601 standard which designates Monday as first day of the week. For further details, refer to the DAYOFWEEK function. Note that the ObjectScript $ZDATE and $ZDATETIME functions count week days from 0 through 6 (not 1 through 7).

second: If the date-expression contains fractional seconds, InterSystems IRIS returns second as a decimal number with whole seconds as the integer component, and fractional seconds as the decimal component. Precision is not truncated.

millisecond: InterSystems IRIS returns three fractional digits of precision, with trailing zeroes removed. If the date-expression has more than three fractional digits of precision, InterSystems IRIS truncates it to three digits.

sqltimestamp: InterSystems IRIS converts the input data to timestamp format and supplies zero values for the time elements, if necessary. The sqltimestamp (abbreviated sts) datepart value is for use only with DATEPART. Do not attempt to use this value in other contexts.

A datepart can be specified as a quoted string, without quotes, or with parentheses around a quoted string. No literal substitution is performed on datepart, regardless of how specified; literal substitution is performed on date-expression. All datepart values return a data type INTEGER value, except sqltimestamp (or sts), which returns its value as a character string of data type TIMESTAMP.

Date Input Formats

The date-expression argument can be in any of the following formats:

The InterSystems IRIS %String (or compatible) value can be in any of the following formats:

  • 99999,99999 ($H format)

  • Sybase/SQL-Server-date Sybase/SQL-Server-time

  • Sybase/SQL-Server-time Sybase/SQL-Server-date

  • Sybase/SQL-Server-date (default time is 00:00:00)

  • Sybase/SQL-Server-time (default date is 01/01/1900)

Sybase/SQL-Server-date is one of these five formats:

mmdelimiterdddelimiter[yy]yy dd Mmm[mm][,][yy]yy dd [yy]yy Mmm[mm] yyyy Mmm[mm] dd yyyy [dd] Mmm[mm]

where delimiter is a slash (/), hyphen (-), or period (.).

If the year is given as two digits, InterSystems IRIS checks the sliding window to interpret the date. The system default for the sliding window can be set via the %DATE utility, which is documented in the legacy documentation available at https://docs.intersystems.com/priordocexcerptsOpens in a new tab. For information on setting the sliding window for the current process, see the documentation for the ObjectScript $ZDATE, $ZDATEH, $ZDATETIME and $ZDATETIMEH functions.

Sybase/SQL-Server-time represents one of these three formats:

HH:MM[:SS:SSS][{AM|PM}] HH:MM[:SS.S] HH['']{AM|PM}

If the date-expression specifies a time format but does not specify a date format, DATENAME defaults to the date 1900–01–01, which has a weekday value of 2 (Monday).

For sqltimestamp, time is returned as a 24-hour clock. Fractional seconds are truncated.

Invalid Argument Error Codes

If you specify an invalid datepart option, DATEPART generates an SQLCODE -8 error code, and the following %msg: 'badopt' is not a recognized DATEPART option.

If you specify an invalid date-expression value (for example, an alphabetic text string), DATEPART generates an SQLCODE -400 error code, and the following %msg: Invalid input to DATEPART() function: DATEPART('year','badval'). If you specify a date-expression that fails validation (as described below), DATEPART generates an SQLCODE -400 error code, and the following %msg: Unexpected error occurred: <ILLEGAL VALUE>datepart.

Range and Value Checking

DATEPART performs the following checks on date-expression values. If a value fails a check, the null string is returned.

  • A valid date-expression may consist of a date string (yyyy-mm-dd), a time string (hh:mm:ss), or a date and time string (yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss). If both date and time are specified, both must be valid. For example, you can return a Year value if no time string is specified, but you cannot return a Year value if an invalid time string is specified.

  • A date string must be complete and properly formatted with the appropriate number of elements and digits for each element, and the appropriate separator character. For example, you cannot return a Year value if the Day value is omitted. Years must be specified as four digits.

  • A time string must be properly formatted with the appropriate separator character. Because a time value can be zero, you can omit one or more time elements (either retaining or omitting the separator characters) and these elements will be returned with a value of zero. Thus, 'hh:mm:ss', 'hh:mm:', 'hh:mm', 'hh::ss', 'hh::', 'hh', and ':::' are all valid. To omit the Hour element, date-expression must not have a date portion of the string, and you must retain at least one separator character (:).

  • Date and time values must be within a valid range. Years: 0001 through 9999. Months: 1 through 12. Days: 1 through 31. Hours: 0 through 23. Minutes: 0 through 59. Seconds: 0 through 59.

  • The number of days in a month must match the month and year. For example, the date '02–29' is only valid if the specified year is a leap year.

  • Most date and time values less than 10 may include or omit a leading zero. However, an Hour value of less than 10 must include the leading zero if it is part of a datetime string. Other non-canonical integer values are not permitted. Therefore, a Day value of '07' or '7' is valid, but '007', '7.0' or '7a' are not valid.

  • If date-expression specifies a time format but does not specify a date format, DATEPART does not perform range validation for the time component values.

Examples

In the following example, each DATEPART returns the year portion of the datetime string (in this case, 2018) as an integer. Note that date-expression can be in various formats, and datepart can be specified as either the datepart name or datepart abbreviation, quoted or unquoted:

SELECT DATEPART('yy','2018-02-22 12:00:00') AS YearDTS,
       DATEPART('year','2018-02-22') AS YearDS,
       DATEPART(YYYY,'02/22/2018') AS YearD,
       DATEPART(YEAR,64701) AS YearHD,
       DATEPART('Year','64701,23456') AS YearHDT

The following example returns the current year and quarter, based on the $HOROLOG value:

SELECT DATEPART('yyyy',$HOROLOG) AS Year,DATEPART('q',$HOROLOG) AS Quarter

The following example returns the birth day-of-week for the Sample.Person table, ordered by day of week:

SELECT Name,DOB,DATEPART('weekday',DOB) AS bday
FROM Sample.Person
ORDER BY bday,DOB

In the following example, each DATEPART returns 20 as the minutes portion of the date-expression string:

SELECT DATEPART('mi','2018-2-20 12:20:07') AS Minutes,
       DATEPART('n','2018-02-20 10:20:') AS Minutes,
       DATEPART(MINUTE,'2018-02-20 10:20') AS Minutes

In the following example, each DATEPART returns 0 as the seconds portion of the date-expression string:

SELECT DATEPART('ss','2018-02-20 03:20:') AS Seconds,
       DATEPART('S','2018-02-20 03:20') AS Seconds,
       DATEPART('Second','2018-02-20') AS Seconds

The following example returns the full SQL timestamp as a TIMESTAMP data type. DATEPART fills in the missing time information to return a timestamp of '2018-02-25 00:00:00':

SELECT DATEPART(sqltimestamp,'2/25/2018') AS DTStamp

The following example supplies a date and time in $HOROLOG format, and returns a timestamp of '2018-02-22 06:30:56':

SELECT DATEPART(sqltimestamp,'64701,23456') AS DTStamp

The following example uses a subquery with DATEPART to return those people whose birthday is leap year day (February 29th):

SELECT Name,DOB
FROM (SELECT Name,DOB,DATEPART('dd',DOB) AS DayNum,DATEPART('mm',DOB) AS Month FROM Sample.Person)
WHERE Month=2 AND DayNum=29 

See Also

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